


SOUTH PARK'S DEAD!

by happyobbys



Category: South Park
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Major Character Injury, Minor Character Death, Murder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:00:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 24,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21740824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyobbys/pseuds/happyobbys
Summary: It's been years since Kenny McCormick and Eric Cartman got out of school and ever since then, they've been living together in the nearly abandoned town of South Park. Nearly everyone else has moved on to better things, but those two..? They might just be the sole reason for the strange tragedies that happened before everybody else had left... and the reason for the flood of old classmates randomly coming back.
Relationships: Craig Tucker/Tweek Tweak, Stan Marsh/Wendy Testaburger
Comments: 7
Kudos: 22





	1. School's Been Out

**Author's Note:**

> This is a thing I like to write about in my spare time. It might not get far, but as long as I enjoy it, I'll write it.

Kenny took a sharp breath in. He had pulled his old, musty parka away from where the upturned hood sat on his mouth. The damn thing had to have been fifteen years old by then, maybe even more. It fit him still, and although it was a little tight, he would take what he could get. When his parents, God torture their souls, had bought it for him, he was only in elementary school and had to be constantly adjusted to fit him as he grew. It was a men’s medium that had been thrifted from the Salvation Army in the next town over. It used to smell like pleasantly old cologne back then. It stank like pizza grease and gas stations now. 

After high school had ended, South Park shrunk. So many people left, so many people died, a couple went crazy, and Kenny was stuck with Eric Cartman, who worked at the gas station on the outskirts of town. Eric, due to unfortunate and deserved circumstances, was never able to skip town like he always wanted. Kenny was financially unable to leave too.

Eric, even after all of these years, was as racist and antisemitic as ever, at least in his humor. He matured in a lot of ways… yet still kept that same horrible glow he had always had ever since he was a child. You could tell when he was going to make a racist joke from a small smirk and a gleam in the eyes. Then out his mouth spewed some tastefully offensive bullshit about Jews or something. Kenny would snort as he tried to hold back laughter, smile under his hood, and smack his friend on the back of the head playfully. Eric never liked it when he did that. “Kenny!” he would whine, then go on about how hurt he felt and how he was going to have a bruise. It was one of the things that stayed the same about Eric. Kenny always liked it. 

Kenny shifted his position, trying to find a more comfortable way to sit on the lopsided roof. He was Cartman’s roommate, or Cartman was his. The two lived in Kenny’s house, the shit-shed he inherited that sat on the bad side of town. Cartman had been kicked out of his own place after going to juvie for two years. He was dirt poor, and Kenny was dirt poor too. They made it by on Pop-tarts and Cheesy-Poofs mostly. Not that either of them minded. They had fun living in shit together, ripping on each other, and talking about the boundaries of life and death and hot chocolate mix.

“Boo.” Cartman had grabbed Kenny’s shoulder, startling him and making him nearly fall off of the roof where he sat. “You thinking about Nascar?” 

Muffled, Kenny told Cartman to “fuck off, you stupid fatass” earning some angry protests from his fat friend. Then, Cartman took a seat next to Kenny and stared out at what Kenny was looking at, still having an angry pout on his face. As far as he could see, it was just trees. Kenny saw freedom, but he could never figure out why. 

“Do you… ever miss those guys?” mumbled Kenny. He pulled the hood of his parka down, revealing matted blonde hair and a dirty face. He hadn’t showered in weeks, and really he never planned to ever again. 

“You mean Stan and the Jew?” Eric knew he was being rude about Kyle. He smiled as he earned an irritated glare thrown his way. “I miss ripping on them, yeah. And the other guys too. But fuck those guys for leaving! Least we still got Clyde to fuck around with.” Eric paused as if he had suddenly lost his train of thought. Then he sprung up with a devious grin. “I made a super scary Halloween prop drop down in front of him at the shop the other day and he literally pissed himself and started crying!” 

“You’re fuckin’ kidding! He did not!” 

“Oh, he did, Kenny. It was a whole mess. I had to clean it all up ‘coz I didn’t want the garage smelling like cripple piss... I ended up giving him the rest of the day off, actually, so it all kind of backfired, heh.” Cartman stared down into his lap. His face turned a frustrating shade of red. Embarrassment coursed through his veins. If he were still in elementary school, he would’ve never even considered any chance of sympathy. 

“Seriously,” Kenny asked, “you’re so soft that you really let him get away? You at least ripped on him good, right?” 

“Oh, I’m never going to let him live it down. He pissed so much that I legitimately thought a pipe had burst somewhere.” Cartman shifted his position, now leaning back. “But it wasn’t like there was any business for us to keep up with anyway. I figured that he could have the day off.” 

Kenny looked around. No shit there wasn’t any business. He could see all the houses, most of them with ‘For Sale’ signs stuck up in their yards. The only ‘kids’ who had stayed were Kenny, Cartman, Clyde, and Butters, who they didn’t really like to think about much anymore. Everyone else had moved, quickly becoming successful in some way. They were all mostly living their dreams. Jimmy and Timmy made it big as a comedic duo, Stan and Wendy got married two years once school was out, and Kyle managed to graduate from law school early and become majorly successful. The only ones who didn’t have it so good were Craig and Tweek, and even though Tweek was addicted to crack (his parents were actually arrested for having laced his coffee with it when he was younger), the couple still had each other. 

And left in stupid, sad South Park was the few who were destined for nothing in life. The two couldn’t act out on any potential that they had, they were too risky for anybody to hire. Their criminal records (especially Eric’s, which listed a multitude of random violent crime,) made things worse. Cartman wanted to go into acting. He desperately auditioned for some sort of legitimate and serious role, but his looks were deceiving. Any offer he got was for some sort of happy-go-lucky fat comic relief character. Even thinking about playing roles like that made him shiver, but nobody wanted a serious actor who wasn’t ripped and handsome. 

Kenny’s attempts to get a job were even worse. He was a huge failure too. He never had any goals, no future to act upon, but no weakness either. The only things he had going for himself were the fact that he was willing to take any job, and the ability to die over and over again, and even with that superpower, Cartman was the only person who could ever remember when Kenny actually did die. Everybody else forgot right once Kenny woke up again.

“You really gotta find a job,” sighed Cartman. Kenny sighed and looked at his fatass friend. He nodded, then stood up and stretched. Kenny had no skills, spare for opera singing, and nobody would ever bother hiring him with how he presented himself. He refused to remove his parka in most circumstances, and employers didn’t like him wearing his uniform over it. Even if he would’ve taken the damn thing off, he stunk like weed and garbage. He was constantly sweaty and covered in filth. For now, there was nothing he could do about it because of the water bill being cut off. And even if it wasn’t he probably wouldn’t bother showering anyway. 

“You wanna go see Clyde with me?” Kenny asked. Cartman looked at him, confused. 

“Why are you going to Clyde’s place?”

“I owe him for breaking my fall when I fell off of his roof the other day. I mean, I still died, but it was super fucking funny.” 

“Yeah, alright then." Eric nodded. "I’ll come.”


	2. A Mess of a Boy and His House

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, chapter two! If y'all like Clyde Donovan, I gotta say sorry for this one... (he's one of my favorite characters lol)

Kenny gently knocked on Clyde’s door. Then once he got no response, he loudly pounded on it. From inside, there was a loud clatter, followed by the sound of a shattering dish, then a nasally voice shouting out “AW SHIT!”

“I think he might need some help with something, Cartman-”

“No, let’s see how this all plays out…” 

Cartman chuckled to himself as more clumsy noises came from inside the house, including, but not limited to; the loud crashing of pots hitting the floor, something that sounded like a firecracker going off, a clock chiming, the rip of fabric (along with the curtains in the front window being pulled down), and finally, the reveal of a disgruntled young man in a wheelchair with his hand on the doorknob. He sighed and looked up at the two from where he sat.

“It was unlocked, y’know,” Clyde sighed at the two. Cartman smirked at his coworker. 

“Oh, we knew,” Cartman hummed, “we just wanted to see what would kill you first: your mess of a house or how much you suck at using that chair.” Clyde rolled his eyes at Eric. He poked a finger into his chest and gave him the stink eye.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. It’s hard getting around when you’re limited to a fucking chair. Maybe I’ll cut your legs off and see how you like it.” said Clyde, his voice wavering with something that Eric liked to call ‘pissed-offedness’. He gave Eric a moody glare, then sighed as he stared down at what remained of his legs. 

Clyde’s right leg ended at the knee while the left was cut off at the foot. He was wearing one of the pairs of jeans that Kenny had tailored into weird jean cargo shorts for him. Sewing was one of the only other things Kenny was good at thanks to how often he’d have to tailor his own clothes as he grew. Clyde would’ve done it himself but his hands were nowhere as nimble as Kenny’s. He’d always end up stabbing himself in the finger with the needle instead.

“Not my fault you got hit by a semi-truck, Clyde,” Cartman said, “Kenny’s told me what it’s like to get fucked over by one of those things before and it does not sound fun.” Cartman glanced over at Kenny, who bitterly exclaimed “Dude!” under his parka. 

“How would Kenny ever— is this another one of those pranks where you try and convince me that Kenny is immortal or something?” Clyde crossed his arms, “Well, haha, you guys. Thanks for making fun of the traumatic experience that ruined my life.”

Eric was about to make a cripple joke and argue, trying to prove that, yes, Kenny is immortal, but he’d said the same argument to him about fifty-seven times already in the past two weeks and he wasn’t up for Clyde’s dumb and nasally voice to go on bitching about how he had no legs anymore. Eric nodded, then threw his friend a fake look of sympathy (although it certainly could have been mistaken for real, because Eric was a very good actor), and, just to piss him off a tiny bit more, started to speak in a stupidly patronizing voice.

“I’m vewwy sowwy, Cwide,” Eric started, chortling halfway through most of his words, “What can we do to hewp you?” 

“Well you can stay down here and help me clean up all this shit I knocked down. Kenny, I want you to go upstairs and grab my prosthetics and my liners, please.” Clyde said. Kenny nodded, giving a thumbs up. It wasn’t the first time Clyde had asked him to do this, so he certainly was good at finding wherever Clyde had left them laying upstairs. He stepped past his two friends and started up the cluttered steps that led to the upstairs bedroom.

Out of the group of people that Kenny considered his friends, Clyde for sure had the nicest house, and definitely the nicest personality. He was also still being sent money from his dad so he was able to pay for his bills. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough to pay for his stairlift to be fixed, and neither would his father for a while. It made Kenny wonder how Clyde’s prosthetics even ended up stuck upstairs, but he knew Clyde was dumb enough to have something like that happen, so he shook his head and stopped thinking about it. 

Of course, his mind would go on about Clyde’s ruined life plans. He was twenty-one, everybody else had already skipped town, and Clyde was just about to go to the college of his dreams. Kenny couldn’t remember what it was a school for anymore, but he remembered Clyde bursting into his house and holding up his acceptance letter with a grin the size of a whale. Kenny smiled at the memory. It was one of the fonder ones he had from after he turned twenty. The only other ones were receiving news of his parents’ drug overdoses, and his little sister Karen being able to move in with her boyfriend in a town way better than South Park. 

Clyde, after entering Kenny’s house, had stayed for the day. The two, and Eric after an hour, had played some stupid video game on Eric’s Xbox for hours, then Clyde decided to leave. The bruised and tearful face of Clyde’s hospitalized body flashed in Kenny’s mind. He stopped moving and shivered. “God,” he mumbled under his hood, “a semi-truck of all things… and to live through it.” 

Kenny cleared his head before he got too lost in thought. He looked around, taking in his surroundings. He hadn’t been to Clyde’s house in a while, and everything looked as if it had been hit by a tornado since the last time he was there. He reached the top of the stairs, and everything about the mess was familiar. It reminded him of his own house, which was in total mayhem too. One more glance around and it became apparent that there were no prosthetics were spotted, so he moved into Clyde’s room.

Clyde’s room was messy. It was a bundle of filth that smelled of dirty dishes and Playboy magazines. The only clean part was the bed, which looked like nobody had touched it in days. On the floor, in front of the bed, sat a pile of filthy clothing with the fake limbs sat on top. Kenny moved in to grab them, but he stopped to cringe midway through. As filthy as he was himself, Kenny couldn’t help but reel back as he saw how much of a pigsty the place was. He set Clyde’s mission for him aside and grabbed the empty laundry basket that was placed near the door instead, then began shoving handfuls of disgusting clothing into it. He was glad that he was wearing gloves. 

After a few minutes, the laundry basket was stuffed with as many items of clothing as it could fit, leaving the room more pleasant to the eye. Kenny smiled, sat down the basket back by the door, then left the room. He quickly ran back in a few seconds after, though, to pick up the prosthetics, which he had moved near the doorframe while he was cleaning. Then he left the room for the last time and started to go back downstairs. 

Walking down Clyde’s steps was a pain. They were covered in random junk to avoid stepping on, especially as he held the fake limbs, but the most annoying part was always random and overly eventful conversations being held downstairs without him. As he heard the muted talking through the walls, he grabbed a random empty glass from one of the piles of dishes next to him.

“No!” Eric was heard shouting from the kitchen. Kenny took a seat on the untidy steps and tried to listen to what the voice was saying more clearly via placing a cup to the floor, but it was cluttered by the sounds of running water and dishes being washed. 

“You haven’t even bothered trying to talk to him in years, Eric! It’s your fault he’s like that!” Clyde roared. He was nasally and angry and reminded Kenny of a hungry mosquito who wanted to eat some blood. Kenny sucked air through his teeth. Every time he heard a conversation like this happen between Cartman and Clyde, he always knew it was about the same thing. Always the same touchy and controversial subject that sprung up when they ended up left alone.

The two were having another steaming row about the only other classmate of theirs that lived in town. 

They were going on about their old friend Leopold ‘Butters’ Stotch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun, dun, dun! What's up with Butters? Who knows..! New chapter should be soon! I'm having a lot of fun writing this.
> 
> I feel as if the boys might seem a bit out of character, but I'm going to go further depth into Clyde's actual personality soon and not just talk about his tragedy. He's toughened up a bit in the personality sense though. That's all I can say for now!


	3. A Memory, and an Argument

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! I'll be taking a little longer to put out more detailed chapters in favor of the hastily written ones I've been making!

Kenny leaned back against the steps, not bothering to try and properly hear the ongoing conversation. Eric and Clyde were going on about Butters again, an often brought up discussion when the two were put together. Once again, they argued of the tragedy that befell the poor boy, causing his intense paranoia, his hallucinations. The slightest mention of the name Butters could jog Kenny’s memory enough to make everything seem like it all happened on the day prior. The whole situation was meant to be a simple and harmless prank. It wasn’t planned out for trouble, just for laughs. They just wanted to see Butter’s doughy face turn red as he realized that it was all a joke. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, Kenny would tell himself on sleepless nights. There wasn’t a single high schooler who had disagreed with the plan. Not even Wendy Testaburger objected. 

The whole thing, that dastardly prank, had been an idea spawned in the basement of Cartman’s old house. In trade for cocaine, which Cartman had managed to get via suspicious yet unquestioned circumstance, the goth kids had allowed for the usage of their gothic-style motorcycles. The bikes were shiny, black, and had donned silver skulls on the fronts. They’d been custom decorated by the goth kids themselves and were the only reason that some then considered them badasses instead of faggots. 

The four teenagers who had some general idea of how to ride the bikes, Stan, Craig, Token, and Kenny, were to slowly stalk Butters as he made his way to the bus stop. They had been decorated with zombie-like makeup and wore edgy clothing borrowed from the Vamp-Kids, who reluctantly agreed to join in on the prank. Kenny still had the ugly, paint-stained hoodie that he wore for the whole ordeal. It still smelled as if it were stained with edible blood. 

The main intention was for the bikers to begin the prank by creepily chasing Butters, then for the whole high school, all dressed as the undead, to convince him he was in an apocalypse type situation. Eric would then guide Butters to the school, the only ‘safe’ location that remained uninfested in South Park, but the fake zombies would speed up, closing in on them once they’d arrived. They’d rush up to the roof, Butters panicking and crying, and in the heat of the moment, Eric would reveal his bitemark, quickly transforming into a zombie and joining in on the chase. They’d corner Butters, trapping him with nowhere to go on the side of the roof. Then, to calm him down and make him feel like an idiot, they were going to reveal that ‘surprise! It was all a big prank!’, but they misjudged Butter’s fearful impulsiveness. 

Kenny stood. He was tired of imagining what happened again, and he couldn’t stand the festering images of Butters hitting the pavement for another second. The prank was over, and it had been over for years. They made the mistake of listening to one of Cartman’s ideas, thinking it would work out how he planned. It couldn’t matter less to him. All he was aware of was that he was part of the group that fucked Butters up for life, but at least Butters lived through it. They destroyed his future, but none of it mattered. Butters lived. Butters lived and never managed to leave that god-awful town.

Kenny tucked Clyde’s prosthetics under his arm and made his way down the mess that Clyde called stairs. He entered the kitchen, where quarreling voices and the clinking of dishes shouted outward at him. The kitchen, at least near the sink, had been significantly cleaner than it was before Kenny went upstairs. He made a loud ‘ahem’ with his voice, then followed it with another, even louder noise, catching the attention of his two red-faced friends who were placed in front of the sink. They. in unison, twisted their necks to the side and looked behind them.vKenny could see relief flash in Clyde’s hazelnut brown eyes. 

“Oh, thank God you exist, Kenny,” exclaimed Clyde as he wheeled over to Kenny through the path of shoved aside junk. His eyes were bright with glee as he happily snatched his things out of Kenny’s gloved hands. The prosthetics were equipped, and Kenny held out a hand to help his friend up out of the chair. Clyde took it, grinned at the parka-wearing personal savior, and slowly stood up, taking his sweet time to get readjusted, for the first time in a month. 

“You have no idea how much better this feels over being stuck in a chair twenty-four hours a day.” Clyde gently ran in place, then started maneuvering his way around the things in the kitchen. “My stupid stairlifts broke and I couldn’t get back upstairs forever.” 

“Wait, Clyde, you’ve been lazing behind the counter all-day for the past month because your fucking stairlift broke,” Cartman asked, almost entierly pissed-off. He slapped a palm to his face, then descended it down his face. He sucked in a harsh breath.

“I’m a fucking mechanic,” Cartman said in disbelief, “Clyde! YOU’RE a fucking mechanic, Clyde! You could have fixed this shit the whole goddamn time!” 

Clyde seemed to have dozed off as Eric tried to yell at him, as did most people whenever he said anything in a loud voice. He looked at Cartman, registered what had been yelled at him, then turned to look at his stairway, which was not visible from where he stood. “Those things are expensive to replace,” he gestured to where the stairlift would be, “I didn’t want to risk blowing it up or something like that. You know I’m not good at doing that stuff.” 

“Wuh- Clyde, you’re stupid buff in the arms! You probably could have just pulled yourself up the stairs with your hands!” Eric shoved past Clyde to go look at the stairs. “And the lift is at the fucking top! Did you fall off and roll all the way down while you were going up or something?

“No,” Clyde explained, “I was at the top without my prosthetics on because they get annoying if I keep them on too long, and then I was considering going downstairs later, and then I put my hand on a plate by accident and it slid out from under me and I accidentally fell down the stairs.” 

“How does that even- don’t use your fucking stairs as a shelf, Clyde! It’s literally like the number one rule of life!”

“You guys are both fucking stupid, you know that right?” Kenny said. He had pulled down the hood of his parka and was rubbing his fingers into his temples. Two angry ‘stay out of it!’ glares were thrown his way, but he couldn’t have cared any less. Being around two idiots who insisted on fighting no matter the circumstance gave him a killer headache. Clyde had become enraged as well, and now that he was standing, he ached to walk right over to Eric and shove him but managed to keep his unbridled rage under wraps in fear of Eric pulling a Scott Tenorman’s Parents on him.

“Well,” sighed Clyde, trying his best to dismiss the situation, “everything is crisis averted now, so it doesn’t matter, Eric.” He turned away from Eric and faced his front door instead. “Can you please fix my stairlift for me.”

Eric gritted his teeth, groaning through them. “Fuck you,” he breathed at Clyde, “Seriously, I’d kill you right now if I hadn’t made a vow not to beat up cripples.”

The argument then rose from the ashes, and Kenny was forced to bear with whatever bullshit the two were going to go on about for the next twenty-three minutes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm planning for the next chapter to be longer than average, so there may be a few days wait before it's released! Until then, I hope you enjoyed this new one!


	4. City Foods

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! I've been pretty busy for the past few days but I'll try and do better!

‘Jesus fucking Christ shitting on a stick in the woods,’ Kenny thought as he left Clyde’s house, both of his friends (although he would’ve really called them acquaintances at that moment by how much they made him want to shoot himself in the head) by his side. During one of the precious moments of calm in their stupidly absurd and impertinent fighting, he quickly advised going out and buying groceries since none of them had bothered to stock their fridges (Kenny and Eric’s didn’t operate, so they just used it as yet another cabinet for snacks) in roughly a week. It was agreed that they’d shut their mouths and go, allowing Kenny a glimmer of relief upon his tired ears.

Kenny occupied front the front of the sidewalk, leading the others and not fretting to watch where he was going while Clyde and Eric noiselessly butted heads behind him. Clyde’s face scrunched up in a futile pout, then was hastily turned away from Eric, who prevailed as victorious for the fifth fight in a row. Clyde, for the past few fights, was seriously losing his will to strife, Eric had thought before the dispute had ended, and he was right. Clyde, for all of the feuds in the past month, had ended up serving the role of Eric’s bitch the entire time. Eric devilishly smirked, gave Clyde that shit-eating, smug grin, then turned towards Kenny, who was talking a multitude of wrong turns as he led, to jollily pursue the grocery store where he was headed. 

Eric took in a breath of the crisp winter air. Looking around at the abandoned houses that sat empty in the neighborhood where he walked, Eric’s mind flickered back to his childhood, cherishing the fun he’d have playing vulgar tricks on his friends and threatening the nerds who thought performing scenes from the Harry Potter books that hadn’t appeared int he movies was cool. He yearned for his simple childhood back and, spare for his soul, would trade anything for his teenage years too. Even throughout high school, he never stopped playing pranks on those around him like everyone said he would, and he never stopped and wondered what would happen to him in the future either. Once he had been released from juvie in his junior year, he went straight back to being the same Eric Cartman, he just lived with Kenny due to his mother resenting him. 

It was a rush of nostalgia coming down upon him, and it nearly made Eric feel repentance and longing for the sweet childhood years he had wasted locked up for breaking into private property with the intent of stealing a shit ton Stan’s dad’s weed. Even so, he fondly reminisced over the horrible pranks he pulled on his friends, especially that time he convinced Butters that he was stuck in virtual reality, then managed to get himself stabbed by a hooker. Yes, it put Butters in the hospital, but the wound wasn’t serious and it still stood as one of the funniest things that had ever happened to him. Eric loved being a child and wanted to go back to fighting elves (aka beating up a bunch of kids who dare question his authority) as he ruled Kupa Keep in his awesome grand wizard king hat. He would never forget that the Stick of Truth, the stick that gave him control of the fictional universe, was buried in his old backyard next to Clyde Frog’s grave, and he was nearly tempted to go back and dig it up. 

“Wake the fuck up, Fatty-Doo-Doo,” Kenny said as he rocked Eric’s shoulder back and forth. Eric snapped back to consciousness, realizing he had gotten so caught up in his recollections that he didn’t even realize they had reached the disheveled grocery store that stood where City-Wok once was. Of course, it had been the same structure, run by the same fake Chinese guy, but it was renamed City-Foods and served as an all-purpose grocery store for the declining (dead, actually) town. 

The group strolled into the building, where Mr. Lu Kim stood behind the counter, sunk over upon it. He sprang up at the sight of customers, however, and quickly moved to greet them with his typical “Wer-com to Shity-Foods, nee any asshistance, pree?” though, once he noticed who had entered, he groaned. 

“Oh, hi, Dennis,” Lu Kim unenthusiastically responded to the boy’s entry, drooping back down onto his counter, “how you and your friens?” 

“We’re good,” Kenny mumbled through his parka, “did you get any new customers this week?” 

“No, nobody bur anotha two crippur kid.” 

Kenny could make out what the cashier was saying, but he wanted to make sure what he heard was really what Lu Kim had just said. “Another two… what?” he asked. ‘Another two crippled kids? They could only be…’ his thoughts whispered to him. 

“You knooow! The crippur kids! One them got two crutch and one them got chair an’ look like he retarded!”  
Kenny rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t believe if Lu Kim had really just described Jimmy and Timmy or not. He looked around at Clyde and Eric, who were staring at him with a confused gaze. Eric quickly tapped Kenny’s shoulder, pulling him to the side to loudly whisper “How the fuck did you just understand what he said, coz’ I didn’t catch any of that shit.”

Clyde, who was annoyingly leaning in and listening to what Eric was saying, nodded in agreement with him. “Yeah, me neither. I couldn’t get a single word of it-”

“Wait,” Eric said, shifting his attention to Clyde, “not a single word? Are you a fucking retard or something, Clyde?”

“Shut it, fatass! I’m not good at understanding accents!”

“Well, clearly, if you couldn’t understand a single word! I mean, I at least got the word ‘cripple’ out of it, so I thought he was talking about you, but-” 

“Can you two shut the fuck up?” Kenny intervened. He was going to kill somebody if his two idiots kept talking. He turned back to Lu Kim as his friends brooded. “Two crippled kids? Like, you mean kids as in, like, college-aged? Like their early twenties and stuff?” 

“Yeah, yeah! Rike you tree!” Lu Kim returned. Kenny glanced down, realizing that his hands had started digging into each other during the conversation. There was a widening gash in his dried-out skin, and it didn’t help that he had relentlessly picked at it as the conversation had gone on. It wasn’t his main focus though, and he looked to his sides to see if he could locate his bothersome friends, who were now missing from his side. They had wandered off and were promptly grabbing things from the store shelves since their main purpose of going to City Foods was to actually buy groceries and shop. Kenny sighed, ignoring his friends, then firmly looked back up at Lu Kim.

“Did one of them try and tell you a joke? And the other only say the word ‘Timmy’?” 

“Oh, yeah! They rear funny! You know those kids?”

Kenny could feel his body start to vibrate out of joy. It was an overwhelming feeling that made his body nearly start shutting down, but he stood firm, smiling and giggling like an idiot. He hadn’t felt any true emotion since Stan got married, but with hearing the news that his old friends might finally be back in town, he couldn’t help himself from bouncing on his heels out of excitement. 

“You guys!” Kenny exclaimed to Clyde and Eric, who were at opposite sides of the store. He grabbed the attention of both of them, who looked over at him very pissed-offedly. “The fuck do you want?” They asked in unison, garnering irritation from both of them. They were about to start going off at each other, but Kenny had gotten his words in before either of them could resume their feud.

“Guys,” Kenny beamed, “Jimmy and Timmy are back in town!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is definitely the set up for something bigger, but I might fuck around with some character backstories...


	5. The Totally Real Zombie Apocalypse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! I tried to write a longer chapter than normal this time :D

The trio of Kenny, Eric, and Clyde frantically left the small grocery store, bags of groceries in their hands. They called out the two rhyming names Jimmy and Timmy as they began to wander around town, no set idea of where the two would be. It was going to be a struggle trying to find them, but all three boys knew that if on foot, Jimmy and Timmy couldn’t have gotten far, which was conveyed via a sick joke Eric made about crippled people. Luckily, it earned the anti-everything asshole a harsh shove from Clyde, who didn’t take lightly to Eric’s bullshit after he became a subject to the constant torment and cripple jokes that were now constantly slung upon him. Eric, luckily, had become better at keeping his cool than when he was younger, which Clyde was thankful for because if the trio had still been nine-year-old kids, Clyde would probably be dragging himself home on his hands with no prosthetics in sight. 

“Clyde,” Eric started, surprisingly carrying a lack of malicious intent to his words, “why the fuck are you so mean to me now?” Clyde, who was expecting yet another ‘you’re gonna be lucky when you die coz if you go to heaven, you’ll get wings to replace your legs’ joke, turned his head over to Eric. 

“Whaddya mean?” Clyde asked.

“Like, remember that time I was talking about the girls’ cootie catcher in my basement and all of the guys were around us and Stan and Kyle were trying to ridicule me like always? And then, like, you got all mad and were like ‘You mocked Sir Cartman but now you demand answers! Let him talk!’ or something like that?” 

“No,” Clyde said, “literally not at all. How do you remember shit like that?” 

Eric groaned. “I remembered it, Clyde, because it made me think ‘huh, Clyde’s my friend,’ so where did that go? You used to... like… always support me and whatever shit I was doing.” 

Clyde fidgeted with his fingers, staring down at the ground to think. He thought back to his childhood, then managed to remember that he did commonly praise Cartman’s antics. He couldn’t remember why, but he had always, for some reason, looked up to Eric as a strong figure who he should take after. Not in political views, of course, but in a sense of will. Eric’s will, his actions and planning, it was all flawless in a sense. On the spot, he could create masterful plans that could rival the wit of all around him, even adults, when he was only eight years old. It seemed amazing to Clyde, and he couldn’t help but respect Cartman’s authority. 

“I dunno, Eric. I know that there was one time when we were kids that you were gone and I got dubbed as the new fat kid-”

“You are fat, Clyde. You’re, like, pretty fat-”

“Shut up! I was dubbed as the new fat kid and everyone started making fun of me how they made fun of you, and I kind of… sympathized with you? And like, once that happened, I started to respect you once you were back. Like, I looked up to you-”

“Um, no shit you looked up to me, Clyde,” Eric interrupted, “you’re like five foot four. You’re short as hell-”

“See!” exclaimed Clyde. He threw his hands up into the air. “I’m five foot five, asshole! Now I’m the only person for you to make fun of because you’re as poor as Kenny and I’m the only person who’s different! I don’t like it!” 

“You don’t wike it?’” Eric mocked, “Grow up, Clyde!” 

“No, you fucking grow up and-”

“Jesus CHRIST!” Kenny yelled over his friends. He pulled down his hood, allowing his voice to be loud and clear. “If you guys are going to keep up your lovers quarrel, can you please get a room so I don’t have to listen to your hate sex? We’re supposed to be looking for Jimmy and Timmy, not pissing each other off!” 

Both boys, Clyde and Eric, looked at Kenny like he had just taken a massive shit over both of their faces. Eric was ready to outrage, throwing a fit over how he ‘isn’t gay and he’s proved it over and over,’ but sunk back. He would have never been too intimidated to speak up against Kenny of all people, but seeing the hateful fires burning in Kenny’s eyes, he kept his mouth shut and walked a little further behind the group. Clyde quietly muttered a sorry, then joined Eric’s side. They uncomfortably walked next to each other, sharing a single space on the sidewalk and awkwardly glancing at each other from time to time. Kenny had also changed from when they were younger, they could agree. He’d become way less tolerant of fights within his friend group. Any time that they’d fire up an argument, which was extraordinarily often between Eric and Clyde, he’d become incredibly pissed off in a matter of minutes, snapping and yelling at his friends until they’d stop. Of course, it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t handle a debate between two people he knew. He had his parents to blame for that. 

Clyde and Eric, being at constant friendly war with each other, were used to Kenny’s outbursts. After a few minutes of silently exchanging glares, they were back to their normal selves, pushing and shoving each other side to side. That time, they made sure to keep things in a friendly manner as to not cause Kenny to snap at them again. The group was also back to yelling out for their old friends who were, according to Lu Kim, back in town for the first time in years. At that point, they were passing by the elementary school, which had been shut down and abandoned from a lack of funding and care. All of the remaining children in town, and there were only about six in the entire area, had been homeschooled by their parents and could seldom be seen playing outside. It was all video games and watching nickelodeon on Hulu at that point, and, as a kid who grew up with hardly any electronics, it made Kenny disappointed in what children could consider fun. There was no more meeting up in one kid’s backyard and dressing up like cowboys anymore. If they wanted to do something like that, they’d probably just change their Fortnite skin to look like a cowboy or something. Kenny wasn’t actually sure how the game worked, but he was no good at stuff like that anyway, so he didn’t care much. 

“Jimmy? Jimmy Valmer! Timmy Burch!” Eric yelled. He could feel his voice getting hoarse. Reaching into his bag, he grabbed a can of Double Dew and popped the lid. Kenny, at the sound of the tap opening, looked back at Eric. Saying something unintelligible that sounded like a demand for the drink, he reached out to be handed the soda. Eric pulled the can close to himself, refusing to share. “No, Keeny! That’s my Double Dew Keeeny!” 

“I’m not your fucking cat!” Kenny exclaimed. He tried to grab the Double Dew from his friend once more, but Eric was faster than he expected. The sweet and overly caffeinated soda was pulled away from him once again, now being raised over Eric’s head. “I’m not getting fucking herpes from you drinking out my can.”

Eric shoved his bag of groceries into Kenny’s hands. It was filled with snacks that Kenny liked, mainly mini powdered donuts and Diet Coke. Kenny smiled. No matter how horrible Eric was, he would occasionally silently do nice things that were always unexpected. Really, Kenny had to give Eric more credit than most would’ve given. Eric made all of the money for their house because Kenny, even after half a year of searching, still couldn’t find a reliable job. All of his money came from the pity checks that Karen mailed to him, which he couldn’t thank her more for. He hopelessly wished to see his little sister again, but none of their plans to meet would ever end up working out. Kenny didn’t have a driver’s license and Karen lived too far to drive to Kenny’s house. He’d saved enough money to take the test and already knew how to drive (Eric would lend him his car. It wasn’t like there were any cops to pull Kenny over anyway) but the six closest locations to take it had shut down years ago, and Eric wasn’t willing to drive four hours to help Kenny get a license. It was a whole mess. 

Kenny reached into the bag, grabbing a bag of Diet Coke. He opened it, then pulled his hood down only to be frantically latched onto by a blonde boy that he used to know. 

“K-Kenny!” Butters exclaimed, holding onto the boy for dear life, “You gotta help me! The zombies, they-” Butters quickly turned around, seeing Eric and Clyde walking behind him. He let out a shrill screech. “-they’re right there!” 

Butters grabbed Kenny’s hand, quickly pulling him away and ahead of the other two boys. Clyde and Eric sighed, looking to each other and shrugging. Butters, who was totally delusional and convinced he was in a zombie apocalypse, had often pulled stunts like that. Even so, the trio was getting sick of the same scene happening over and over. They wished that Butters would just wake up and realize that, no, Eric and Clyde weren’t dead, but Eric refused to talk to Butters, not even wanting to ever bring up the situation that caused Butters to become so… crazy? Clyde would put it that way, but he didn’t want to be insensitive. He normally called it “Trauma-Induced Schizophrenia” to Eric, but he never knew what Butters’s actual condition was. 

“What is it this time, Butters?” Kenny asked as he was pulled into an alleyway, Butters still firmly gripping his hand. Butters bend over, hands on his knees and panting. He looked up at Kenny, which caused Kenny to look away and deeper into the alleyway. He couldn’t stand looking at Butters’s face anymore. Not since fourth grade. Butters had a massive scar running down his blind left eye that was due to Kenny fooling around with ninja stars. It hurt to know that he had caused Butters even more problems. 

“W-well, I was being chased by zombies! It was Jimmy and Timmy, but they were, uh, they were dead!” Butters wheezed. “So I ran and ran, and then I saw you! But you had those two zombies on your back like ya’ always do! So I grabbed you and took you here!” He gestured to the alleyway around him, which he had seen as a secret base. It smelled like rotting plants and Kenny could hardly take it. He sighed, about to speak, when two pairs of heavy footsteps caught up to the two. 

“Jesus Christ,” Eric choked out as he desperately attempted to catch his breath, “we really have to get him to stop doing shit like this!” 

Butters looked at Eric, wide-eyed and scared. Taking a deep breath in, he shoved his arm in front of Kenny, intending to sacrifice himself as long as it meant his companion got to continue to exist. He slowly took steps backward, farther into the alleyway, pulling Kenny along with him. “You stay back, monsters!” Butters shouted. His voice was surprisingly courageous. “If ya’ wanna eat Kenny, ya’ gotta get through me first” 

Clyde nudged Eric’s arm, giving him a ‘seriously, just fucking talk to him’ look. Eric shook his head, crossing his arms to show he firmly stood in his place when it came to interaction with Butters. He stubbornly refused to talk to the insane boy no matter the situation, leaving Clyde bothered to no end. 

“Seriously, Eric,” Clyde angrily snapped, “just fucking talk to him!” 

“No,” Eric yelled back, “I’m not gonna-”

“Aaah! They’re gonna attack!” Butters hollered. Tears welled in his eyes, leaving Kenny with pity twisting in his gut. Luckily, he’d been planning what to say for the next time Butters would pull him away from his group. He shook his delusional buddy, gathering half of his attention. 

“Butters- Stop screaming! Butters!” Kenny shouted. Butters snapped out of his fearful trance, looking over to Kenny. He quit backing up further into the alleyway as if he had forgotten about the two ‘zombies’ that stood in front of him. 

“Yeah?” Butters asked. 

“They aren’t zombies anymore! They-”

“Aren’t zombies? Did ya’ hit your head? They’re snarlin’ it up over there!”

“No, no! They’re talking normally, you’re just too scared to realize it! We found an antidote last week, actually! They’re cured, completely back to humans!” 

Butters stared in front of him. He saw two zombies, dead as a doornail. He closed his eyes and shook his head, then rubbed his palms into his eyes. It was a sudden transformation, but the two figures in front of him were no longer bloodthirsty undead monsters. They were Eric Cartman and Clyde Donovan, and instead of growling like they were about to eat Butters, they were arguing about the situation instead. Butters smiled, then started giggling and laughing. 

“You… You two!” Butters exclaimed, cheerfully running toward his two previously zombified friends. “You’re back! You’re human and you’re back! You fellas don’t know how happy I am to see ya’ good and alive again!” He swiftly pulled the two into an unexpectedly tight hug, leaving Clyde smiling and Eric’s body tensed. Butters pulled away from both boys, switching his gaze to specifically Eric. His eyes flushed with hot, heavy tears as he glared into the confused eyes of his previous friend. His arms wrapped around Eric, his face sinking into his friend’s chest. He was sobbing and grinning. His dead friend, best friend, was back to life! Or, that was how everything played out in his head. 

“E-Eric… I’m so glad you’re alive! I thought that… that...” Butters choked on his words. With his voice being enveloped in fabric, he sounded surprisingly like Kenny. He gently released Eric, who was now covered in tears and snot. Butters took a deep breath in a mostly successful attempt to stop himself from continuously crying, but a few sniffles persisted. “I thought that you were dead forever, Eric. You have no idea how glad I am to have you back…” 

Clyde, once again, nudged Eric, that time with heavier emphasis. Eric groaned, shoving Clyde to the side with exaggerated force. Clyde tripped over a bag of trash, hitting the alleyway wall. Butters quickly went to help him up when Clyde’s legs caught his attention. 

“Aw, geez, Clyde,” he stammered in typical Butters fashion as he pulled Clyde off of the ground, “what happened to your legs?” 

God, Clyde really did not want to explain everything to his insane (and insanely delusional) friend. He looked around, then put a hand behind his head. 

“Uh, well…” Clyde stammered. “I’m a cyborg now?” 

Butters’s eyes lit up. “Wowie! A real live cyborg?” 

“Yeah, but I don’t like to talk about it since, uh… my legs were eaten by the zombies. It’s… traumatic? Is that the right word?” 

“Oh,” Butters said, averting his eyes from the cool cyborg legs, “my lips are zipped then, buddy!” 

“Thanks,” 

The four left the alleyway, Kenny and Butters chatting it up about the ‘apocalypse’ and Eric being deathly silent. After a few minutes of walking and talking, the group continued searching for Jimmy and Timmy, who Kenny had claimed have also been cured. The group walked on, slowly losing interest in the search for their past friends. The sun was setting and Eric had started endlessly complaining about how his feet hurt and how he was short of breath, springing a sequence of fat jokes from Kenny. For the hundredth time that day, some sort of fight broke out between the boys, only being broken up by a car pulling up to the group.

The car was shiny and red, white racing stripes lining its front. Slowly, the driver’s seat window rolled down revealing a brown-haired boy with unfocused eyes and a misshapen face. He smiled a lopsided smile along with the strawberry blonde sitting in the passenger seat next to him. 

“Well, h-h-hey, fellas!” Jimmy Valmer, the driver of the car said. “Hop on in!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you were expecting this chapter to be about Jimmy and Timmy, sorry! That's gonna be the next chapter! I wanted to get a bit more into Butters and what exactly the problem with him was.


	6. Juh-Ji-Jim-Ji-Jims-Juh-Jim-Jimmy's Cuh-Car

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing Jimmy's stuttering is by far one of the most irritating things I have ever done. However, it was also super fun, so we'll give it a pass..

Kenny pulled open the door of Jimmy’s sleek sports car. The thing must have cost a fortune, which was good news for him and Eric. Maybe this was their chance to escape South Park, or at least eat a hot meal for once instead of cereal for dinner. Of course, Kenny was slightly ashamed that his first thoughts when seeing how wealthy his friend was were to use him, but he was always known for doing anything if it meant money. Still, he shook the manipulative thoughts from his head and looked inside the car.

The interior was leather. A gust of ‘new car smell’ wafted into Kenny’s face, and he took it in like it was the best thing he had smelled in a while... because it was. The car had three seats in the back, which made it unfortunate that Butters had just joined the group. The four would either have to uncomfortably shove into the seats (and they definitely would not fit), or somebody would have to sit on another person’s lap, which was, in the boys’ standards, completely and totally gay, which most of them totally were not. Rather, all of them were not, but that was just if you asked them. Obviously, they would deny it, being gay, that is, but maybe it was the truth. Or possibly a complete lie. It really didn’t matter. 

Kenny, not wanting to be the totally gay one, rushed into the car first, stealing the leftmost seat and quickly buckling in. 

“Sorry, guys,” Kenny said, “looks like there are only three seats. One of you guys is gonna have to sit on Cartman’s lap.” 

“What?” Cartman shoved into the car, taking the middle seat. “Why my lap? That’s totally fuckin’ gay!” 

“Yeah,” Clyde added, “super gay!” Without thinking about his actions, he followed Eric into the car, leaving Butters outside. Butters looked into the car, then started shoving Clyde in further and onto Eric’s lap with a surprising force. 

“‘Scuse me, fellas!” Butters exclaimed. He jostled Clyde onto Eric, receiving groans of protest from both of them. Once he was in his own seat, Butters slammed the car door shut and put his seat belt on. "Looks like you’re sitting on Eric’s lap, Clyde! You and him are too big for us to all just squeeze in!” 

Both Clyde and Eric angrily glared at Butters, Clyde especially giving him the death stare. Clyde had been aware that compared to the other guys in his class, he’d been of considerable size, but he was nowhere as fat as Eric! Eric, however, thought otherwise. He had convinced himself, no, he was not fat. He was big-boned. Clyde was actually fat, but not Eric. It was just… Eric’s lifestyle! Yeah, those words seemed to fit into place in Eric’s warped mind. He angrily attempted to shove Clyde off of his lap, but Butters was already in the car, and way stronger than Eric had assumed. The delusional blonde easily pushed Clyde back onto Eric despite Eric’s efforts. 

“Clyde’s too fucking fat you guys!” Eric complained, his cry stifled by the back of Clyde’s hoodie. “I can’t fucking breathe!” 

“I’m not fucking fat,” Clyde blurted out, “you’re the fat one, Eric!” 

“No, no, no! I’m festively plump! You’re the one who sat at my desk eating chips all day for half a month instead of working!”

“Because I didn’t have my prosthetics!” Clyde gestured down to his ‘legs’, accidentally elbowing Eric in the process. Eric angrily shoved Clyde’s arm away from his face. 

“Yeah, coz’ you’re a dumbass who fell down the fucking stairs!” 

“You’re the dumbass!” 

“No, fuck you, you are!” 

“No-” 

“FELLAS!” Butters shouted. “All this screamin’ is makin’ my head pound! Could ya’ have your little feud a lil’ more quiet?” 

“Or,” Kenny interjected, “just shut up?” 

“Y-Y-Yuh-yeah, you guys..s.saaah…” Jimmy stuttered, “You sound l-like an old married couple!” 

“Timmy!” Timmy agreed. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Eric mumbled, “fine. We’ll change the subject. What the fuck are you two doing back here? I thought you became world-famous comedians?” 

“Comedians?” Butters exclaimed. “I thought they were zombies ‘till you fellas changed ‘em back!” 

“Uh,” Jimmy sputtered, “w-what’s wrong with Buh-Butters?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Eric said, “now, seriously, did you kill someone and now you’re here in hiding or some shit?” 

“W-Well, yes…. Ju-just kidding, Eric.” Jimmy started the car. He was driving in an unknown direction, which certainly wasn’t the way to his house. “Me and Tim Tim over here kind of fell from the r-r-ruh-ruha, the ruha-ruh-rate-ratings.” It was odd, how he had said it with full confidence as if he didn’t even care about his lifelong dreams shattering down upon him. And, truthfully, he didn’t. He was nearly glad it happened, as it allowed him to come back to South Park, his wonderful, totally not dead, hometown. 

“Mmhmm!” Timmy sounded. “Timmy, Timmy!” 

“We’re actually quie-quite glad about it. We were g-guh-guh-getting sick of t-the big-name companies trying to te-teh-tell us what to d-do! South Park feels like wuh-one of those places where outsiders can’t get in, y’know? Luh-Like the air is too heavy for them to breathe, but we’re f-fine since we’ve been breathing it all our lives!” 

“Oh,” Eric said. He knew what Jimmy had meant. It was the uncanny feeling gained from existing within the town once everybody had left. Sure, it had always been there, but it had been especially strong after the sudden mirage of ‘tragedy’ befell the small Colorado town. With everyone gone and Butters crazy, nothing felt right anymore, like it wasn’t even a real place that existed in the universe. Cartman felt his hand unconsciously reach to the middle of his chest, where a small vial of Kenny’s blood sat around his neck, tucked under his red Metallica hoodie. It was for emergencies, like if Kenny died and Eric really needed to talk to him, but he always found himself reaching for it when he needed comfort. A thought of drinking the vial at that moment ran through his head, but he restricted his imagination from turning to reality. 

The drive had suddenly become painfully silent as none of them could think of another subject to talk about thanks to the tense nature of those inside the car. They’d sat wordless and awkward, none of them daring to break the quiet that tightened around them.

Clyde had shifted around nervously notwithstanding the light shoves of objection from Eric. The currently reserved nature of the car made him feel like a snake had twisted around his neck, suffocating him. He could feel his heartbeat hasten as he nervously gazed about the car. To his right, Butters was signing random letters to himself in ASL. He spelled out “E-A-D-B-U-T-Z-O-M-B-I-S-R-O-K” which Clyde couldn’t make any sense of. He switched his focus off of Butters, then looked to his other side, where Kenny was leaned against the leftmost window, sleepily staring out at the night sky. Clyde hadn’t even realized how late it had gotten, and the car ride had been going on for an endlessly long amount of time. He didn’t even recognize where they were anymore.

“Uh, Jimmy?” Clyde whispered. His throat felt too packed full of discomfiture to speak at a normal volume. “Where are we?” 

“Well, Cuh-Clyde, I’m not really sure,” Jimmy answered, “since you fellas didn’t give me a p-puh-puh-puhla-plae-plae-puh-place to go, I’ve just been driving around.”

“Ooh,” Butters chimed, “we could go back to my house! I’ve got a TV and an X-Box and everything! And you fellas look like you all bought snacks, so we could have a sleepover!” 

“No, Butters,” Eric said, surprising Clyde since Eric had sworn to never talk to Butters again, “that’s super fucking gay. We aren’t eight anymore.” 

Butters blinked at Eric. “Whaddya mean? Sleepovers ain’t gay!” 

“No, you’ve got it all wrong, Butters,” Eric sighed, “I’m telling you that if we have a sleepover, Clyde is gonna end up buttfucking someone because literally everybody in this car, except me and Timmy, are totally fucking gay.” 

“Hey!” Clyde protested, “I would NOT buttfuck someone!” 

“Oh, I’m sorry, Clyde. What I meant to say is that you’d get buttfucked. We all know you don’t have the balls or the legs to buttfuck someone.” 

“Okay,” Kenny said, “you’re going too far again, Cartman. Stop making jokes about Clyde being crippled.” 

“Wuh-what do you mean Clyde is crippled?” Jimmy piped up. Clyde was one of the least crippled people that Jimmy knew, at least from a physical standpoint. 

“Oh, you guys weren’t here for that,” Clyde spat. He hated talking about it, but it always seemed to come up eventually. “It… I was… Well, it’s kind of funny.” He groaned, then quickly wiped the tears that prickled in his eyes away with his palm. Fuck, he really hated having to drone on about it. 

Clyde tried his best to stop himself from choking up, but few lone sobs slicked their way into his words. “I was accepted into a really good college because they wanted me to play football. And, uh, I got my letter and ran off to show it to these guys. We hung out for a while, then I had to go back to my house. And, I was so happy that I didn’t look where I was going… and... “ 

Clyde had started crying, his nasal voice letting out upset wails. He sounded a lot like he did when he was younger, bitching about whatever was going on through his cries. 

“Aaand… Wuh… I got… I got hit by a seeeeeeeeemitruuuck! And they- they- they- had to get rid of my foot and my leeeeeeg! And I had to pay for all of the surgery so I couldn’t afford collegeeee… And it ruined my life and I don’t likeeeeeeee itttttt!” 

“Oh, w-wuh-well that sucks, Clyde,” Jimmy said, a mild lack of sincerity in his voice. He didn’t get why Clyde was making such a fuss about it. He’d been crippled his whole life and nothing stopped him from doing what he wanted. “I’m very sorry that thuh-that happened to you.” 

“Wait,” Butters said, “I thought he was a cybor-”

The car came to an abrupt stop before Butters could finish his sentence, the impact causing Clyde, who was not buckled in, to jolt forward, nearly flying off of Eric’s lap. Eric quickly wrapped his hands around Clyde’s shoulders, stopping him from slamming too far forward. He pulled his sobbing friend back into place, giving him a quick pat on the back. Clyde’s tears were getting all over the cool leather interior of Jimmy’s car, but Jimmy didn’t really care, as he had stolen that car in Texas. 

“Well, feh-fellas!” stuttered Jimmy, “We’re at Buh-buheeh-buheeeht-buuht-buuheeet-buh- We’re at Buh-buh-buheh-” 

The stuttering went on for about a minute and a half. 

“We’re at Buh-Butters’s house!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're almost to 10000 words! This is becoming one of the longest pieces I've ever written! 
> 
> Anyway, I'm hoping to get a bit more done focused around Jimmy and Timmy next chapter, especially how they feel about Clyde joining their little group. I'll also delve into the real reasons why the two are back and a bit more on the current state of South Park!
> 
> Happy Holidays, everyone!


	7. The Zombie-Proof Fortress of Chaos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year! 
> 
> I forgot to mention in the last chapter that there probably isn't going to be any shipping in this fic. The whole 'that's fucking gay' thing between Eric and Clyde in the last chapter was just for shits and giggles. It felt like something that would happen, so I added it for fun.

Butters was the first to exit the car. He avidly hopped out, swirling around to present his 100% Zombie-Proof house to the rest of his friends. Once he was out of the way, Clyde quickly bounced off of Eric’s lap, completely red in the face. Eric sucked in the deepest breath of his life. For the entirety of the drive, he had been drowning in the fabric of Clyde’s hoodie. It felt good to finally take a clear breath. He exited the car, following Clyde, then met with Kenny who had departed from the other side. Jimmy had also gotten out and was hoisting Timmy’s wheelchair out of the car’s suspiciously rotted-smelling trunk. Clyde, despite the pungent vibes that Jimmy had projected upon him during the drive, went to help. 

Eric and Kenny were left staring at what had become of Butters’s house in horror.

None of them had traveled Cartman’s street, which held the houses of Butters, Cartman, Stan, and Kyle, anymore. They instead walked around that block, through the disheveled playground where the four would play basketball in their youth. It had been a while since any of them had seen the states of the houses, and while Stan, Kyle, and Cartman’s houses sat abandoned and for sale, Butters’s place had become a fortified mess of hastily nailed wooden planks and thick blackout curtains. The front door was lined with spikes and signs that read “ZOMBIES NOT WELCOME!” or messages of the such. It was the standard apocalypse-proof house that had shown up in every zombie movie on the planet. There were even makeshift bombs and traps littered across the lawn, which Kenny looked into, reminiscing over the explosives he would use for his Mysterion powers when he was eight. He still remembered how to quickly craft grenades from nothing but a lighter, rubbing alcohol, and beer bottles, which he was in a constant supply of. 

“Well, do ya like it?” Butters exultantly asked, prideful over his fortress of pure defense. He had put the whole thing together himself, nailed every hunk of scrap wood on by hand, and carefully placed each and every trap. His house, his base, had been the only pride and joy he had left after all of his friends turned to zombies who were constantly after Kenny’s entrails. Of course, now that their ‘disease’ had been undone, he could be proud to have such wonderful friends once more, but his stronghold would still stand as the light of his life for the moment being had. After all, he had tirelessly slaved away for weeks to turn it from a wimpy house into the lion of a home that it was! 

“It’s…” Eric couldn’t find the right words to pertain to the situation regarding the multitude of questions that were begging to be asked. “Did you do all of this by hand?” 

“Yup!” Cheered Butters, who was apparently a very good craftsman. Maybe that was why he was so strong, Eric thought. 

“Wow, I didn’t think you were that insane, but-”

“Whaddya mean ‘insane’?” 

Eric quickly went to change his wording. He had forgotten that Butters truly thought that South Park was in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. 

“Insane...ly good at building! Your craftsmanship is, uh, wonderful!” 

“Oh!” Butters smiled. Why he never expected a compliment from Eric Cartman of all people!” “Thanks! I worked real hard on it!” Butters pumped his fist into the air as if to show a feat of strength. 

“I can tell…” Eric looked at Butters’s hands, which were rough and calloused due to the busywork he’d forced himself to endure all day. It amazed Eric, what insanity could turn people into because it seemed to have molded Butters into a strong handyman type character. The used-to-be-poor and used-to-be-wimpy boy was no longer the group punching bag. He was firm and robust, vigor surging through his veins. Sure, he was still dumb, but he had become tough! It surprised Eric to no end, especially with how Butters managed to keep the skinny frame of Peter Pan. He looked the same old Butters, just with a heavy winter coat instead of an insulated shirt. He had the same scar on his left eye, the same incompetent smile, even the same high pitched voice with the same slightly southern accent, but he was different. Butters had become a new person, an independent person, all on his own, and Eric had missed it happen because he was too sanctimonious to admit that Butters ever becoming delusional was to his accountability in the first place.   
Butters had changed, Butters had become better, improving himself upon his inflicted faults, swerving around them with grace and fixing what they were all because of Eric Cartman. All while that very same Eric Cartman would spend nights awake, tossing in bed and wondering how much he had truly fucked up his friend’s life, then spend the following days avoiding the boy whose life he assumed he devastated in the first place. 

A sigh of relief coursed through Eric’s body, followed by a bubbling rage following it through. He wanted to laugh, to yell at Butters, to beat the boy to a pulp. Even with all of the hardship’s Butters had been through fortifying his house, he couldn’t be stronger than Eric! There was no way that Butters, BUTTERS of all people, had managed to develop himself as Eric was stuck worrying about the past. He should have been the one over things, forgetting trauma and using it to build. Butters was meant to be stuck in a fucking asylum because he thought the world was going through a zombie apocalypse! It wasn’t fair! How come Butters just had to jump? He should’ve stayed on the roof, humiliated as Eric revealed the prank! Eric wouldn’t have had to sit through a year of people calling him a murderer, an asshole, telling him to jump right next to Butters but actually fucking die! He wouldn’t have had to suffer from people telling him that he was the one who deserved to be put into a year-long coma, to finally wake up and be completely delusional! Butters should have been conscious during his senior year of high school, not comatose in Hell’s Pass Hospital! 

Timmy and Jimmy traveled next to Cartman, who looked like he was about to turn somebody’s parents into chili. They were about to say something when they also noticed that Butters had turned his house into some sort of defense castle. They, much like Eric, thought that it was brilliant handiwork. Of course, they had nothing but praise with no intolerant jealousy thrown in the mix. 

Jimmy looked to Butters with applaud (or, he would have applauded if his hands weren’t stuck holding onto his crutches). “W-Wow, what a wonderful house ya’ got h-here, Buh-Butters!” 

“G-Good!” Timmy added, who had learned how to force out a flurry of new words over his high school years. It was all thanks to the brilliant special education teachers at South Park’s schools that managed to help him become even more handicapable. 

“Aw, shucks!” Butters hit the boys with one of his classic smiles. “I’m gonna blush if y’all keep complimentin’ me like this!” 

Butters walked to the front door, the other boys following him, carefully hopping across a bridge of garden tiles as to not detonate any of his many traps. Clyde and Eric ended up picking Timmy’s wheelchair up since it had been too clunky to navigate the path without setting anything off. Once they had reached the doorstep, they lowered Timmy down as Butters unlocked the many passcodes on the door. There were two padlocks, each requiring keys that Butters had on a keyring, a mechanical puzzle in which he navigated a small piece of metal through a maze and into a hole, a keycode lock with the password ‘01234567’, each number playing a different recording of Butters saying the word chaos, and a small chain which had to be undone. 

After about thirty seconds, Butters had managed to open his house door. All of the boys sighed, Jimmy rushing in particularly quickly since he hadn’t been wearing anything but a button-up shirt and it was frighteningly cold outside. The house hadn’t been heated up yet, but it sure felt good to get out of the wind. 

The inside of the house didn’t match the outside at all. It was the exact same as it had been when Butters was a child, even the pantry organized alphabetically. Everything was in place, clean and proper, whiplash on the eyes of Kenny, Eric, and Clyde, who had been living in dumps for the past few years. Butters turned the heater on, then gestured for the rest of the gang to follow him to the kitchen, which was also clean, spare for the table which was covered in carefully rationed boxes of long-lasting food, most of it being cup noodles and beef-flavored cubes. In the fridge, however, there was fresh produce, which was stuff Kenny and Eric hadn’t tasted in a long time due to their broken appliances and unwillingness to learn how to cook proper meals. Eric suddenly felt like a kid again, in a warm, clean house where he would have his mom do everything for him.

“Uh, Butters, do you know how to like… cook?” Eric asked. He was dreadfully hungry and had felt that audacious feeling settle in.

Butters nodded. “Yeah, I do! I’ve got enough chicken to make tacos for all of us if you fellas want!” 

An overlap of agreement sounded from the rest of the crew. Butters got straight to work on cooking, telling the others to go set up camp in the living room. Kenny was chosen to go up to Butters’s room and grab extra blankets for the slumber party guests. It felt weird to him, how he was always the one to go and retrieve stuff away from the others, almost like he was being sent away on purpose so he could be gossiped about by the others. Of course, this was never the case, but the anxious feeling would still linger in the back of his head. One day, he thought, he was going to be sent upstairs to grab something… and then he would die and nobody would notice. But the thought of death didn’t bother him, as he had died almost every day. His mother was dead so he wasn’t sure how he was getting reborn, but he always seemed to wake up in his own bed, always wearing the same orange parka, which he had many suspicions about. Maybe it was the parka’s fault that death had been so attracted to him, or maybe he was just unlucky, but it hardly mattered since he would respawn so effortlessly. He had even gotten used to the pain of dying, which felt odd since he had never been very tolerant of pain as a child. 

Kenny, for the second time that day, reached the top of a set of stairs. He walked to the far end of the house, where Butters’s room was, and entered. And, oh God, he kind of wished that he didn’t. 

The inside of the room, to say the least, completely petrified Kenny’s body. The walls were covered in scribbled on marker, rather realistic drawings of horribly gory zombies thrown in randomly. On top of some of those scribbles were pictures of him, most of them with the word ‘SOLSTICE’ scrawled overtop. On the rightmost wall, there had been a pinboard covered in photos of crossed out school kids, and a key to what each marking meant in the corner. A large red ‘X’ meant that the person had been turned into a zombie, while a black circle around the person’s face meant they were in a compromised position. Eric’s photo was marked with an unlabeled dark blue scribble, followed by the words 'TRAITOR’ and ‘MURDERER’ scratched into the photo with a pen. Kenny’s photo had a large green check over it, signifying he was safe. He was the only person who had a check, where everybody else (spare for Eric) having one of the labeled marks instead. 

Other than the walls, the room was normal. There was a bed, a desk, a hamster cage, and a shelf filled with chaotic-looking trinkets. The door was fitted with an electronic lock that Butters never figured out to remove despite it being out of service and had many posters hung upon it. The normal items managed to calm Kenny down enough for him to allow himself to enter, and he quickly pulled Butters’s duvet off of the bed. Blankets, a whole bunch of them, were scattered around the room, which Kenny found odd. The bed was also strangely well kept, well, it was before Kenny had ruined it, and the duvet had blown a thick cover of dust away from the bed frame when it was stolen. The whole room felt as if nobody had entered it for a while like Butters had been avoiding entering. A faint chill crawled up Kenny’s spine and he made a swift exit, not wanting the haunting feeling to creep onto him any further.

Kenny returned downstairs, where his friends had been lounging on the couch and floor. He threw the massive pile of blankets on Eric’s head. Eric was about to protest when the covers were hastily pilfered from him by the rest of the boys, leaving him without one. He growled, then attempted to tussle a blanket from Clyde, who was putting up a fight.

“Let fucking go, Clyde, you have one!” 

“I want two! I’m cold!”

“How are you cold? You’re fucking fat!” 

“You are too! Hah!” Clyde successfully kept his blankets from Cartman. Unfortunately, Cartman pounced on the unsuspecting champion. The two were engaged in mortal combat, viciously attempting to tear each other apart over the blankets. Unfortunately, Butters, who would have stopped the fighting, was loudly singing Boom Boom Pow by the Black Eyed Peas and was totally oblivious to the idiotic war going on in the living room.

Kenny stood behind the couch, watching shit go down with wide eyes. The others were doing the same, and in a brilliant stroke of genius, Kenny started to chant the words, “Fight, fight, fight!”   
In a matter of seconds, the entire rest of the room had joined in, and Kenny wasn’t sure if Butters was just oblivious or actually deaf. The small crowd was roaring their chants (Timmy just saying the word ‘Timmy’ over and over until he eventually stuttered out ‘Fight!” and began chanting that), fueling the ever-increasingly violent massacre between the boys on the couch. Clyde had landed a solid right-hook to Eric’s face, but Eric had slammed his knee into Clyde’s stomach, causing a cry of pain. Even so, Clyde continued to fight hard, giving Eric a black eye.

The two rolled off of the couch and onto the floor, bumping into the coffee table in the center of the room. Eric had Clyde pinned, but Clyde was crazy buff in the arms, so he managed to pull himself out from under Eric. He quickly stood, then jumped down onto Eric, who narrowly dodged the blow by rolling out of the way. Clyde’s elbow slammed into the ground, causing him to nearly start crying from the pain, and Eric took the moment to assert dominance. He quickly sat on top of Clyde, pushing all of his weight onto Clyde’s spine (which was rather weak due to the accident, but Eric didn’t know that) and pinned down his arms. Clyde thrashed his legs to no avail. Eric had won the battle, but Clyde knew that it was just the start of the war. Tension would remain high via pranks for the rest of the night, he knew.

Clyde accepted his defeat, stopping his movement, then suddenly start to cry shill cries, worrying the rest of the team. Eric quickly moved off of his friend, then looked down at him with both smugness and concern.

“Mad you lost, Clyde?” Eric smugly asked.

“No, my elbow really fucking hurts!” Clyde wept. He moved to hold his arm. “You guys think it’s broken?” 

“Nope,” Eric said, “def not, you’re just a crybaby.”

“Gotta agree,” Kenny added.

“Me too,” said Jimmy.

“Timmy,” agreed Timmy. 

“Wuh- Fuck you guys!” Clyde cried. He wiped his tears away and was now red in shame. God, all of his friends saw him as a big crybaby! That fucking sucked! 

“Hey, guys!” Butters called from inside the kitchen. “Dinner’s served! Come getcha tacos! 

And just like that, Clyde suddenly forgot about what had just happened, rushing to the Kitchen in search of sweet, sweet tacos. The rest of the boys, who had worked up an appetite through all of their shoutings, were also in hot pursuit of the meal waiting for them. They entered the kitchen where a plate of delicious tacos sat on the table waiting to be eaten.  
And, once again, absolute savagery started.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, okay, NEXT chapter I'll write about Jimmy and Timmy, but for now... tacos :)


	8. Murder Would be Justifiable if Everyone Committed it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! I've had a bunch of big projects due for school that took up my writing time. I'll hopefully be able to write more once midterms are over!

The boys sat on the couch in silence, none of them daring to look at each other. A small creek, as well as the sound of a shower being turned off, came from upstairs. Jimmy had changed into the pajamas he brought, which was a white tank top and some comfortable shorts. His hair was still damp, but Butters didn’t own a hairdryer, so he’d just have to deal with it. 

Returning downstairs, Jimmy announced his presence. “Ah-Alright, you guys. I’m bu-buh-back. I Nluh-left some hot water for the next person.” 

This prompted Butters to get up, who was going to be the last to use his own shower. He pouted at his damp friends, who thought it would be fun to fight over their dinner rations like children! It was if they weren’t even aware that they had to preserve food! He’d already told them to stop messing around when the entered the kitchen but they just wouldn’t listen! And even though not too much got spilled, everyone had ended the food fight covered in the remnants of the tacos they were supposed to be eating for dinner! He marched up the stairs trying his not to be sore at his friends.

Walking to the upstairs bathroom, Butters looked down at the door to his bedroom, where he no longer slept. Something about the room creeped him out, but he couldn’t remember what and didn’t dare to check. He entered the bathroom, then undressed. The water left in the shower was not hot like Jimmy said it would be. It was lukewarm, running on cold, and he didn’t appreciate that even though he allowed his friends to enter his home, use his facilities, and eat his food, they still ripped on him and treated him with disrespect. He wished, just wished, he could maybe get them back in some way, and his brain slipped into Professor Chaos mode for a second, but he snapped out of it once he was pelted with a stream of ice-cold water suddenly rushing down upon him. He quickly finished up with washing himself then got out in a rush. 

He grabbed a pair of pajamas, which he had kept in a cabinet under the sink for easy access after showers, and dressed himself. They were light blue with tiny Terrance and Phillip heads all over them, similar to a pair that Kyle would wear when he was younger but in a darker shade. After that, he wrapped what he could of his hair in a towel, pulling it tight to quickly dry it out. He’d still kept generally the same haircut as he had when he was younger, consisting of a large fluff of hair on the top of his head with shaved sides. It was slightly longer than it had been when he was a child, though, and it was cut jaggedly and unevenly since he was forced to trim it himself every two weeks. He was fine cutting hair, but the problem was that he’d snip at the back of it randomly instead of holding up a second mirror so he could see it. Butters didn’t even like looking in the mirror anymore, having always been terrified of accidentally summoning an entity after he said Biggie Smalls into thrice and brought the trigger happy ghost into his home. Of course, the adventure he went on with Biggie Smalls trying to get to Satan’s Halloween party had been rather enjoyable, but he wouldn’t like to summon another ghost anytime soon.  
Butters swung his towel around his shoulders and returned downstairs, where the group of boys were sitting in a circle and giggling like a group of middle school girls. 

“Oh, and remember that time Jimmy fucked a hooker when he was ten?” Eric exclaimed, bursting out in laughter afterward. 

Jimmy nodded. “Y-Yeah! I’m still fuh-friends with Nutgobbler to this day!” 

“How about when me, Cartman, Stan, and Kyle got stuck in a cave and Cartman ate a bunch of fake treasure coz’ he thought it was the real deal?” Kenny tacked on to the conversation, which had suddenly become awkward as Butters reentered the room. 

“Hey, fellas,” Butters said, noticing the sudden stop of chatter once he entered. It felt odd to watch such a happy, upbeat group suddenly become silent.

“Hey, Butters,” Kenny said. He wasn’t wearing his parka, instead being in a white tank top and boxers, which was what he was wearing under it. “We were just talking about, uh, childhood and stuff.”

“Wowie, can I join?” 

“Uh, sure.” 

Butters rushed over to the circle, squeezing himself into it between Kenny and Timmy. He looked up to the group, who were now all awkwardly looking away, and smiled. The conversation had to start up again sooner or later, Butters knew. A group of chatterboxes like this couldn’t stay silent for long no matter what. Eric opened his mouth to say something, but quickly closed it and became reserved again. Clyde looked like he wanted to talk about his childhood memories too, but he also had hushed himself. Talking about being children with Butters in the room felt more than awkward, especially since most of their memories were of them picking on him in some way. The list was long of what they’d done to him as children, from throwing shurikens into his eye to convincing him that the world was an apocalypse and forcing him to stay in a bunker for three days, they’d all done some pretty messed up thing to him, especially Eric. And, after finally interacting with Butters for the first time in years, he felt as if the room was closing in on him. He made Butters’s childhood a living hell, for the most part, going to far nearly every day with his pranks. Regret surged through him and he couldn’t force any words out of his mouth even if he tried. 

“Remember that one time we-” Kenny started. He stopped himself midway. The memory he was thinking of included them deliberately torturing Butters in it. He switched to a new thought and continued. “-we got stuck in that waterpark because all of the water turned into pee?” 

The chatter started up again.  
“Yeah, I r-ruh-remember that! You suddenly disappeared halfw-way through! We got scared that yuh-you died!” Jimmy exclaimed. The group was back to laughing.

“Remember that Kyle had to drink that jar of pee and everything? He got so mad when it was all for nothing!” Butters added. The group was cracking up now, spare for Clyde who hadn’t been present when all of it happened. Despite that, he didn’t bother asking about it, since he already got the gist of the situation and found it pretty funny too. The group continued to laugh and talk as the hours passed by, and suddenly it was four in the morning. 

Butters leaned over onto Timmy, who was leaning on Jimmy. They were both getting tired, but the other boys continued to loudly laugh and talk. They were all night owls who hadn’t done much but sleep anymore, so they were overflowing with energy. 

And, suddenly, everything got quiet for a second, as if nobody had any memories left to share. It was just a second of silence, but that second sparked a minute, which sparked an awkwardly long amount of time that was seemingly endless. 

“So, really, Jimmy,” Eric started. He’d been strangely silent for the previous conversations, but he finally decided to speak since Butters had already fallen asleep. “What are you doing back in South Park? Like, for real this time.”

Jimmy looked over at his friend with his suspicions building inside him. “Wuh-Whaddya mean f-for real? I’ve been telling you guys the truth, E-uh-Eric.” 

“Like, what was your tipping point. I want to know all about it.”

“Yeah,” Kenny added, “me too. It’s kind of weird how you just show up.”

Jimmy sighed. “I’m telling y-you guys that I duh-didn’t like all the fame. TimTim over here didn’t either. W-we had everything we could ever want, b-but it didn’t fuf-f-feel like what we deserved. Like uh-our success was hollow.”

“Okay, but why would you just give it all up?” Eric asked. “I would never do that!” 

“Uh, well-” Jimmy started. He was quickly interrupted by Clyde.

“Yeah, it's pretty suspicious. You seem like you’re on the run.” 

“W-well, we are on the run. Me and Timmy have buh-been running from the press for about a year.”

“I never heard about you on the news.”

“We wur-weren’t Britney Spears, C-Clyde. We didn’t get tracked that much.” 

“Still, you’d think-”

“D-drop it, Clyde. All of you.” Jimmy, despite keeping a calm demeanor, had anger entwined in his tone. “We’re just back here, okay. W-we didn’t kill anybody or anything!”

Silence once again filled the living room, and Jimmy was clearly upset at the boys who were questioning him. 

“Did you kill someone?” Eric mumbled. Jimmy glared at him, nearly ready to strangle him to death, but Eric continued his sentence before he had the chance. “I mean, I don’t really care because I have too.” 

Suddenly, Jimmy didn’t feel so alone. “Wuh-wait, who did you kill?”

“Well I didn’t kill anyone, but I had a kid’s parents get murdered and then I disassembled the body and turned it into chili and fed it to the kid. Nobody called the cops because they got scared of me.”

“Oh, I-I remember that.” 

“No-” Kenny interjected, “you have killed people. Remember when you drove Nascar?” 

“I killed a lot of people on that day…” Eric almost looked remorseful for his actions, but it obvious he really wasn’t, “but I was still never poor or stupid enough to become a real racer-”

“Shut the fuck up about Nascar.” Kenny turned to Jimmy. “None of us care if you’re a murderer or not, Jimmy,” Kenny said. “We just want to know why you’re back.” 

“Hey, I care!” Clyde said, elbowing Kenny. “Jimmy, you aren’t going to kill any of us, right?”

“N-no, I won’t, Cuh-Clyde.” 

“Ok, it’s fine then.”

Jimmy was amazed by how idiotic and violent his friend group was. Out of all of them, he was pretty sure that Clyde was the only one who hadn’t committed any serious crimes. It felt odd, sitting in a circle and talking about how within that group, ending another human’s life was totally justifiable due to everybody being shitty people. And most of these crimes occurred when they were no more than ten! It was kind of… fucked up? How a group of criminals- most of them didn’t even know they were criminals- was just… sitting around and talking about it! Hell, Clyde was the only innocent person there and he didn’t even care! Everything had become… justifiable? And none of it was shocking anymore either. It felt so normal to be having that horrible, horrible conversation, and nobody even cared. 

“So,” Eric started, “who’d you kill?” 

Jimmy snapped out of his temporary state of pondering. “H-Huh? Oh, juh-just Nathan.” 

“Who’s Nathan?” 

“He was a s-sp-special education kid with Down syndrome. He was ah-actually some type of evil mastermind, using his dis-uh-disability as a cover.” 

“So why’d you kill him?” 

Jimmy looked down at his hands. He could still picture the blood, the body, everything being tied up back in Kentucky. The body had rotted as he lugged it around from state to state, desperately trying to get back to Colorado, and it now sat in the trunk of his very much stolen car, stinking the whole vehicle up. He wasn’t even sure why he bothered taking it back here, as he easily could have disposed of it anywhere else, but the task of burying the body always seemed to slip his mind. Of course, now that he was back, he'd do it in the morning. He’d put it right in the front yard to his old house. God, he didn’t even know if someone else had bought the place. He moved out before high school ended, he and Timmy getting signed for their show when they were in their Junior year. They’d missed a lot of what happened, especially the town turning into an uninhabited waste of space. 

Jimmy blankly stared at nothing, then switched his focus to Eric. “I dunno, Eric. H-he was trying to kill me again, and I thu-thu-think it was an accident. Like, he had c-come up behind me and was going to strangle me, so I took the knife I was using to peel an apple and I stabbed him right in the neck.” 

“Oh,”

“Yeah. An-And then me and Tuh-Timmy left all of our money behind, s-stole our first car, went to Texas, stuh-stole an-ano-another car, and then c-came here.”

“What happened to the first car?” 

“It blew up.”

Eric nodded, a content look on his face. He slumped back against the couch, then crawled onto it. 

“I’m going to sleep,” he announced before shutting his eyes and rapidly falling asleep. 

Clyde looked over at the clock that hung above the door to the kitchen. It was nearly five in the morning, and both he and Eric were supposed to go to work at six-thirty. He shrugged, however, because Eric would probably call the day off.

The rest of the boys got comfy, Jimmy and Kenny gently laying Butters and Timmy down and putting a blanket over them. It had been a long night and all the group really wanted to do was hit the hay. It was a good thing that Butters had enough cushions and blankets in his house that they could each have what was practically their own duvet, and despite the lack of sleeping bags, Butters’s carpet was plush and warm. In only a matter of minutes, all of the boys drifted off into a peaceful sleep.

It was two hours later when Timmy woke up because he heard a strange noise. An inhuman, slightly angelic noise. He sleepily looked up to notice a body hovering midair, light shining from its eyes and mouth. 

The body was Kenny, and Timmy was scared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :P Yeah, Jimmy's a murderer, but that won't matter too much... for now...
> 
> Also, the very end is foreshadowing for the next chapter, which is going to actually set up the main plot of the story, so hooray!


	9. Mormons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while since an update! Sorry about that guys! With all of my exams and studying and homework, it was hard to find time to just sit down and write. Hopefully, I'll be able to continue with faster updates now that all of that's over, and I may even try and start weekly updates if I have the time, but I may not so don't count on it too much x)
> 
> Anyway, prepare for some cryptic ass bullshit!

“What the fuck?”

Kenny’s eyes opened. He was on the floor, surrounded by Mormons while a bright light pierced through his soul. He instantly recognized where he was, as he’d woken up in the exact same position so many times before, and got up.

“Welcome back, Kenny!”

“Welcome back, Kenny!”

“Heya, Ken! Welcome back!”

“Back so soon, Kenny?”

The Mormons clamored around him as he dismissed their words. He hadn’t died, or, he didn’t know if he died, so why was he back? 

“Hey, everyone!” Kenny yelled over the Mormons who were now trying to invite him over to a punch table, “Do you guys know why am I here?”

“Well, sure we do, Kenny!” a friendly Mormon named Bill exclaimed, “You’ve died again like every other time, haven’t you?”

“No, Bill. I was just hanging out with my friends and now I’m here. No death or anything. Actually, can I get a view of my human body?”

Kenny was quickly brought a screen that looked like an IPad that someone had baptized. There were buttons on the right and left sides, allowing the device to function as a security camera of Kenny’s dead body. The screen it was on, the default, was always from Kenny’s body’s eyes, which was the ceiling of Butters’s living room with a stark white glow thrown upon it. Kenny switched to camera two.

“Holy fuck,” Cartman said, staring up at the body. Kenny was just… floating and being kind of godly. That had surely never happened before, so he wasn’t really sure what to do in the situation. Of course, everyone around him was way more panicked. 

Butters was crying and flailing, and Clyde was holding onto him for dear life. Kenny looked like a nuclear bomb to them, ripe and ready to explode. Jimmy and Timmy were scouting out the body, seeing if there was a deactivate button that would stop the whole floating thing. Cartman was just sitting there being useless as always, but he really saw no reason to fret. He knew Kenny would come back to life, or he at least hoped that he would, and if he didn’t he knew he could always just kill himself to hang out with Kenny for eternity. 

No, he couldn’t, because Cartman was afraid of dying.

Kenny switched off of security camera two, which had shown the scene from the corner of his room. Now that he knew that all of his friends were freaked out, he decided to hurry up with what was going on.

“Bill, why am I floating?”

“It’s just because God requires your presence and bringing your soul here while keeping you alive was the easiest option.”

“Fucking-”

“Profanity!”

“-take me to God then, Bill!”

Kenny seriously could not take these fucking Mormons anymore, swarming him and being generally useless every time he died. It pissed him off! 

No… he liked the Mormons. They were nice to him. He was just in a bad mood because his friends were all together at a sleepover hanging out while he was stuck in heaven for no reason. He really just wanted to go back to sleep, there wasn’t much he could do about it if God wanted to speak with him. 

The pair entered a stark white cathedral. It was gorgeous, pure in and out, and Kenny almost felt embarrassed that he had entered into the building in patterned boxers and a wife-beater. However, he’d entered the building so many times in so many different outfits, (a personal favorite of his was swimming trunks and a snorkel, his entire body waterlogged with human piss,) that he hardly cared for what he was wearing.

Inside of the cathedral sat a strange being, stout and looking as if it were a hippopotamus mixed with a cat. It was a figure that Kenny had seen so many times before during his trips to heaven, and still managed to gross him out every time he looked at it.

“Hey, God. You needed me?” Kenny asked the creature in front of him.

“Yes, my child. There is going to be a great tragedy on your world, and it is not by any of my powers that I can stop it.”

Kenny was confused. “You… you’re God. You created the universe! Can’t you do something?” 

“Yes,” God nodded, “I can. That is why I have called you here.”

A sudden pause started up, awkward for Kenny, yet God did not care. He was the creator of the universe, used to people cursing his name and calling him fake. And, in a sense, he was. Sure, he’d formed the universe from his own two hands as Kenny had said, but he was the creator of science as a whole. Those who chalked up their world to nothing more than atoms meeting atoms were correct, and God, wise as he was, could not hate it more. All was true in their universe, every god and prophet. All existed if someone so much as believed it is, and God could only blame humans for the terrible things that existed in the further depths of the universe.

However, he had Satan to blame for the foretold destruction of the world.

“The red heifer has come, Child. The universe, your world, is under a vast spell, forced to shrivel and die, rebirthing itself once it was. I want to protect your world as if I could not create it again. You shall lead the army, and I shall bring it to you.”

Kenny stared at the God in front of him. “What does that-”

“Those you loved, even are acquainted with, will flock like sheep. And those who are forsaken will as well. Pure evil, Child, is what they mean, many of them. And those who are decayed and scattered shall rise from the ground. The same to you, your friends as well. I will refresh you, I will rebirth you as if your mother has not died. Though your friends will remain hopeless, and you will be hopeless, the universe, or at least your world, may be destroyed in a way. In a sense.”

“Slow down! What do you-”

“Time hath been stopped in your world, not for you. Nor for those in his house. And it is seconds from the great first tragedy. I cannot stop the natural laws of the universe I have created, nor can I change them. You may ask the other gods, immortals, and they will not be able to change it either. And when time is resumed, although not for you, you will be forced back into your corpse. I shall lower you, although not with grace, and bless your soul once more. Immortality shall stick with you, and your veins shall have a newfound strength, which you will have to learn yourself. I will resume the world, stop the shedding of tears from your friend who has seen what is to come, grant back the visions of smiling and happy faces to you all. As if you were not ever here, but you will remember what was said. Then, if thou is ready, thou shalt be shoved back into a mortal plane, though remaining with the status held prior.”

Truthfully, God had completely lost Kenny by then, and he had not been able to decipher God’s words, nor could he figure out the intention of bringing him into the cathedral. He’d wanted to ask so many questions, too many to bother with, and his brain lacked the ability to sort through the most important.

Kenny focused, really focused on all of the information he had been told, and still he was at a total blank. The death of the universe? Red heifer? Stopping time and immortality? Jesus fuck, God had been cryptic before, but never to this extent. And God could hear the words running through Kenny’s mind, but they had tangled with the thoughts of billions of others, and he had no incentive to pay attention.

“Uh,” Kenny mumbled, “okay, I guess.” 

Those were all of the words that God needed to hear. He sent Kenny back to Earth as if it were nothing. It started with Kenny sinking down through the floor of the cathedral, then falling through a vast space, planets he had never seen before flashing by him. He fell rapidly, a trail of fire leading after his soul, and suddenly was back in his much known Milky Way galaxy. The planets passed by his face, him not recognizing which was which, spare for Saturn. Even if he had gotten the chance to take a better look, he still would not have known the order of the planets, but their order hardly mattered to a deadbeat zombie such as himself. 

Kenny crashed into the atmosphere, his soul passing through stars, cracking them in two as if his spirit had some sort of mass that plowed through them. Once he hit the stratosphere, he became hollow, entirely, and all feeling and emotion seemed to flee from his being. He had no more weight, could not damage that which hovered around him, and all of his thoughts about God’s words seemed to make sudden sense, though only for a split second. After that second was over, bored overtook his mind, and he wanted the trip back to Earth to come to a swift end. 

Kenny opened his mouth as he crashed through the clouds. They tasted like water, not like cotton candy-like Eric said they would. 

His soul went through the roof of Butters’s house, through the second floor then finally back into his body, which fell down onto the floor with a thump. The bodies of all of his friends (who were standing, so neither Timmy nor Jimmy) went along with it, and for a second, they had all fallen back asleep.

Eric was the first to wake, remembering the entirety of what had just happened, but the others did not follow. They woke as well with their minds erased, groggy and sleepy, as none of them were morning people.

Kenny, however, had shot up, startled and suddenly realizing every single word that God had said to him, albeit rather uselessly as he still could not figure out their meaning. He knew something bad was going to happen, he felt it in his bones, blood, brain, and body. It was going to be tragic, horrifying, and most likely traumatizing for the whole lot of them. And he looked around at the group around him, who were all sleepily sitting up. 

Holy fuck, Kenny realized, God had told him about a tragedy coming once time unfroze in the real world, which he wasn’t sure what meant, but he was certain it was coming, piping hot and soon. His friends, they all looked okay, although most of them seemed grouchy as if they had been suddenly woken up. His eyes darted to the clock on the wall. It was nearly twelve, which made no sense because he was certain that it could only have been about seven o’clock, and there were only a few minutes until the clock would officially reset itself. He was convinced that once the clock made its midday chime, something horrible would happen, something horrible had to happen! It wouldn’t just happen at eleven fifty-eight, would it? No, no! That would be too anticlimactic for such a cruel God’s tastes. 

Whatever that horrible tragedy that God had talked about would be, it didn’t matter to Kenny. He had two minutes until the time it would strike, and he had to make the best of it. He looked at his friends, who all looked as if they had been hit over the heads with frying pans, spare for Eric. Poor Eric was staring at Kenny, scared and horrified as if he had known what was going on as well!

“Kenny-” Eric stammered, nearly forcing the words out of his mouth. Something felt off to him. Too off, too bad, and he knew something bad was going to happen. It all had to do with Kenny too. In the seconds he’d been asleep, he’d seen some strange creature, and it had spoken words right to him. He’d been in a gorgeous church, he thought, and a stout and ugly thing had told him about the end. The red heifer, which he had one day made come true so many years ago. Immortality and the stopping of time outside of Butters’s house. He had to assume he was seeing through Kenny’s eyes. It had to have been! 

Eric was going to continue speaking. He had questions, so many questions as if Kenny was God and he was Kenny. He needed to know what it all meant, if the universe was going to end, why Kenny was to lead an army on Earth. Hell, the creature had even talked of Satan! The unanswered questions that stacked in his brain were beginning to become too much for him to take. Yet he could not figure out where to start. With so many things to ask, what was there to be said? Everything, every question, seemed too unimportant to be the first query! If he were to interrogate Kenny for knowledge of everything he had just been told, he was at least going to do it right. Something important had to be first, yet nothing could come from his mouth as he tried to speak. It was maddening! 

The clock struck eleven fifty-nine. Tick. That damn NOISE. 

“Good morning, you guys.” Kenny rubbed his eyes. He acted tired as if nothing had ever happened, and he could see Eric looking at him like he knew the truth of the situation, but Kenny would not stop his last moment on Earth from being wonderful. 

“G-G-Good morning, Kuh-Kenny,” Jimmy said.

“Morning, fellas!” Butters exclaimed.

Fifteen seconds in. 

“How’d you guys sleep?” Kenny asked. He reached for his parka, which had been lying under him. Slipping it on, he listened to his friends talk. 

“I dunno,” Clyde said, who was just now really waking up, “I had some freaky dreams, but I can’t remember them.” 

“Me too! That’s weird!” Butters said. He had noticed that there was a stark wetness on his face and reached up to touch it. Damp tear streaks ran from his eyes. Huh, he must have cried in his sleep or something. 

“I also hu-had some rather bizarre dreams,” Jimmy added. It was strange how everyone had an odd nightmare. None of them could remember it either. 

Forty seconds in. 

“I dunno, I slept pretty well,” Kenny said. He yawned and stretched. “What’s with that look, Cartman?”

Cartman was staring at Kenny rather blankly, his mouth wide open.

“You’re gonna catch flies with your trap all hung open like that!” Butters said.

Fifty.

“Don’t give me that shit, Kenny!” Eric exclaimed. “What the fuck happened last night?”

Fifty-seven.

“Cartman, I don’t know-”

The clock struck twelve, and as it made its loud chime, Kenny felt his whole body curl down into a fetal position. Eric did the same. 

“What the sam huh-hell is up with you t-”

There was a loud and crashing boom coming from outside, and it lasted for just a moment. The group’s heads turned to the front windows. A fiery explosion danced through them, although only for a second, and they were all suddenly crowding around the glass, trying to see what had just happened.

“F-Fuck!” Jimmy exclaimed. He punched the bulletproof window.

Jimmy’s car, sleek and smooth, had suddenly blown to bits, Nathan’s body still in it. He was more upset that he had lost such a nice car, but the fact that his old friend’s corpse was now raining down from the sky along with flaming metal pieces (and they were lucky that the house did not ignite as well) was rather disturbing news. 

Kenny, however, was relieved as all hell. 

“So that’s what God meant…” he mumbled. Eric looked at him.

“Yeah, it is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIP Nathan...
> 
> again...


	10. Car, Drugs, Stan, Bullet, Axe, Tears

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe it..! This fic has actually made it to 20,000 words!  
> Also!!!!!!!  
> This fic (or at least some variant of it??) is being adapted into a comic on Instagram by me!  
> It's @ ask.southparks.dead on instagram and all follows are appreciated <3

“D-duh-dudes! My fuh-fucking car!” Jimmy slipped his crutches on and hurried outside. It was in shambles, and the smell of burning corpse flooded his nose. The scent was horrible, wretched, and nauseating. Pieces of the car were still coming down from the sky. The whole situation was was exasperating, absolutely fucking exasperating! Jimmy had lost the car he’d worked so very hard to steal in Texas, Nathan’s body was blown to bits with all of the remnants of it on fire, and the $63,000 he had worth of drugs along with all of his money was also completely gone.

“Fuh-huh-ck! I had luh-like a hundred-thousand in there! My fu-fucking ecstasy! My weed! My cuh-cocaine! It’s all fucking gone!” 

“Wait, I thought you said you and Timmy left all of your money behind,” Kenny stated. His voice was muffled once more since he’d slipped his parka back on before going outside. Even with all of the fire, it was still cold outside. 

“Okay, okay! I muh-might’ve lied. I duh-didn’t expect there t-to still be people in this town. It wuh-was just a little wh-white lie!” Fuck, now they knew Jimmy was a liar. They wouldn’t trust him after that either, he thought. Gaining all of their trust back was going to be a doozy, if they had stopped trusting him, that was, but he could always hope for the best… 

“Aw, man, you’re a fucking douchebag…” Kenny mumbled. Of course, he was upset that Jimmy had lied to him, lied to all of them, but he couldn’t deny that he would do the same if he was carrying that much cash, especially around someone like Cartman. He continued the little interrogation he was having with Jimmy, who was rather panicked and looked like he would admit to anything right about then. “And you said you had drugs in there too? Are you an addict or something?” Kenny asked. 

“Not an addict, but I-I was a big name tuh-television comedian, so what do you thu-think?” 

Cartman, who had been pissed off from the start of Jimmy’s lies (Jimmy could’ve been all of their tickets out of South Park if he hadn’t been a lying bitch,) was fuming now. He pushed Kenny out of the way, confronting Jimmy head-on. He shoved his face close to Jimmy’s, who took a quick step backward.

Jimmy could see how Cartman’s rage boiled inside of him. He wanted to swallow his fear, stand up to Cartman’s wrath, but if Cartman wanted to harm Jimmy, he would fucking KILL Jimmy. The fact that Cartman had not stopped walking, forcing Jimmy against the fence in Butters’s yard, was entirely petrifying, especially because there was an active minefield right on the other side of said fence that could easily add another person to the “blown to bits today” category. 

“You’re fucking kidding, Jimmy!” Cartman yelled. He was going to fucking kill Jimmy, “You had money. You had one hundred THOUSAND dollars and you didn’t fucking let us know?”

“I’m sorry! I huh-haven’t seen yo-you guys in y-years! I-I di-didn’t know if I cuh-could t-trust you!” Jimmy could hear his stutter get worse as anxiety coiled his body. He swore he would’ve dropped dead from fear right then if Cartman did something so simple as even raise a fist. 

“We were your best friends, Jimmy! You couldn’t trust us? Has your fuckin’ big name comedy star cocaine gone to head or something? At the very fucking least you could’ve shared your drugs!” 

Kenny, who had been (mostly) clean from drugs and alcohol since high school, not counting the copious amounts of weed he smoked basically every day (he didn’t count weed as a drug since it technically couldn’t directly kill him,) was starting to get annoyed. 

“Okay, how many of you guys still do drugs?” Kenny loudly asked over the two, who were now arguing with each other. Both of them and the rest of the group turned to look at Kenny.”

“Well, I WOULD smoke crack but this asshole right here wouldn’t share-”

Jimmy had broken free from Cartman’s lock on him. “D-dude, shut u-up! I’ll muh-make it up to you, okay! I huh-have connections!” 

“You better,”

Kenny didn’t really care for those two anymore. They were too busy arguing like little children to be paid any mind. Instead, he glared at the rest of the group, two of which were nodding.

“Seriously, even you?” Kenny directed at Clyde, who was shamelessly answering a big fat ‘yes’ to Kenny’s question with a blank expression.

“Only a little bit! C’mon, dude, I really, really miss crack. It makes me forget that I still live in this place, okay...” Clyde paused, then threw a suspicious glance at his parka-wearing friend. “Wait, didn’t we smoke crack together like a month ago?”

“That didn’t count because I was high, Clyde. It wasn’t my decision to smoke crack, it was the weed’s… so Butters the only one here who’s clean?”

“Well…” Butters mumbled.

“Oh my God,” Kenny pinched the bridge of his nose. It reminded him of Stan for a second.

“I am clean,” Butters yelled, “I am! All the dealers are zombies so I can’t buy nothin’! It’s not high school anymore, you guys. I ain’t done drugs since then!” 

“Alright,” Kenny sighed, “that’s fine. We still love you then, Butters.”

Eric, who had Jimmy in a headlock, turned to Kenny. “Kenny, why are you making such a big deal out of all of this shit.”

Kenny looked around, not really knowing what to say. “I’m… I’m irritable right now, okay? I feel like we’ve done something wrong.” 

“Like you’ve been graced by a holier presence?”

“Yes, exactly!” Fuck, Kenny just remembered that Cartman had remembered that Kenny had become all weird and floaty a bit ago. “Like...like- I’ll talk to you about it later, okay?” 

“Fine by me, Kenny,” 

Clyde saw an opportunity to be funny. Really funny. “Are you two gonna hate fuck or something, because I don’t think you should do it in front of a flaming car-”

“Shut the fuck up, Clyde!” yelled the pair in unison. In an instant, Clyde backed down like the little bitch he was. 

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now, fellas.” Butters said, looking at the carnage (and Butters had been making the ‘car’nage joke in his head since the car had exploded) of the car that stood in front of him. For once that morning, the group agreed on something. “It was a nasty loss, but at least none of us died.” 

The group silently nodded, Jimmy and Eric giving up their fight. Butters went back into the house first, followed by Kenny. The rest followed like sheep.

They weren’t sure how long they sat there, but the group had been lounging around for what felt like ages. Loneliness and boredom sunk in despite there being such a large group. Nobody wanted to talk to each other as if the mood had been swiftly shot down, a mocking bird on its own. They were the killers.

Part of Kenny wished that Jimmy and Timmy never returned. That Butters had never rejoined the group. He was happy living with Eric, barely getting by. Pleased by how little he’d see Clyde, making the time they spent together special. Glad that Butters kept his distance with care. Now they were forced together, a team of ragtag criminals who were finally realizing their crimes. Jimmy and Timmy were no exception. They were still them, yes, but they lacked spirit. They weren’t cracking jokes as they did so often when they were kids. They were murderers, drug dealers, and bad people. Or, Jimmy was. Kenny had never been able to understand Timmy like everybody else seemed to.

Despite the fact that he had only ever smoked a single cigarette in his life, Kenny really, really felt like he needed a smoke. That holy feeling, the one that had brought that ‘great disaster’ of the car exploding as God had said, was back. It pushed itself from Kenny’s throat, into his mouth as strong nausea. He swallowed it back. In the time being, he couldn’t give two shits about what God wanted from him, and God did not care very much for what Kenny was doing at the moment either, for he was a busy man. 

‘Creeping’ was the word that Kenny thought to use about the anxious sensation pitifully attempting to force its way out of his mouth. It had suddenly shown up, scared him quite a bit, but his body was stone. He was deeply sunk into the soft armchair that sat in Butters’s living room, and could not be bothered to fix his fears a cup of tea. He hardly cared to harbor them at all, holy or not. Eric felt the same reluctant fear.

Damn, what Eric wouldn’t give to smoke a little bit of crack.

He’d made a vow when he was about nine, which was anywhere from twelve to fifteen years ago. He didn’t care to do the math, which was always his worst subject in school. The vow was that when he was in high school, he would eat like shit, do all of the drugs he wanted, and completely fuck up his own life out of spite for some random asshole who pretended to be a future version of him. 

Well, he’d followed that vow through. Now he was fat, ugly, lazy, and poor. He worked as a car mechanic for a gas station that got less than twenty people going there a day. The only power he had was over Clyde, who ended up working for him. It was a random plus that he’d never expect, but having full ownership over Clyde’s soul for about eight hours a day was fun. At least they got to hang out almost every day. Clyde seemed to make the shithole gas station slightly more bearable than it would be without him. He appreciated it. 

Of course, Clyde could never replace Kenny in Eric’s life. Kenny was Eric’s real best friend, and he would hire him but Kenny was absolute shit with cars. He was also either way too forgiving or a complete asshole when ringing people up. Eric had always called Kenny a light switch, but Kenny never got what he meant. He’d always seen himself more like a cyclops than a light switch. Or, that’s what his soul looked like when he died and went to purgatory.

Purgatory was weird for Kenny and he had not gone there very often. Everybody took a different shape, some more human than others. He’d seen squares, globs of ooze, coffee cups, hearts, giant eyes, bowls of cereal, bullets, tombstones, and other random things with humanlike bodies. Some of them were angry, pissed off about where they were. A few were friendly and would strike up nice conversations with Kenny. One, in particular, stood out.

The one soul that Kenny would always see had a strange puffball for a head. It was a neon shade of teal, much like the color every middle school girl painted their bedroom at one point, and it wore a comfortable looking jacket. Its hands were extremely large, bigger than its own head, and reached down to its shoes. Its head had two large and round eyes, a mouth on both the top and bottom halves of the face. It was a happy creature, Kenny could tell, and he’d always wondered why it was in such a horrible place such as purgatory. 

The puffball, it had never told Kenny its name, was always staring and smiling at Kenny. It would come up to Kenny at random, tell him weird things about the people around him. It’d ask him how he kept disappearing, becoming reborn and then dying again a few days later. Each time Kenny had tried to answer, he’d been interrupted. 

“I can smell the God on you, Kenny,” it’d say. “It smells like shit.” 

Kenny thought it was funny. The puffball man smelled like shit as well. 

A knock on the front door snapped Kenny out of his thoughts. It went ignored by the group for a moment, but the pounding became frantic and a familiar yelling had come from outside.

“You guys, open the fucking DOOR,” the person outside screamed. “I can see that you’re in there! Please, let me in! Butters, I know this is your house!”

“Damn,” Butters said. “He knows it’s my house. If he’s speakin’ like this he ain’t a zombie. I better let him in.”

“Wait, what kind of logic is-” Kenny was interrupted by Butters opening the door, allowing a distressed man to rush inside. 

The man was scruffy, stubble all over his face. Half of his shirt was covered in blood, which was leaking from the woman hooked around his back. He put her down on the coffee table in the middle of the living room causing the group to all scramble backward.

“You- you guys have to help her-” the man choked out. “Wendy’s fucking dying.”

A sudden, almost crippling realization hit Clyde like a truck, which was not a metaphor he liked to use. He’d seen med-kits in Butters’s kitchen last night. He quickly stood, nearly tripped over his own legs, then found his balance and dashed to grab one. He’d never seen a corpse in real life, although he had odd memories of seeing Kenny di. He assumed they were just intrusive thoughts that he learned to live with. Now, he’d been in confined areas with cadavers twice in the past twenty-four hours, only one of which he was aware was that he shared a breathing space with.

The man who had rushed into the house was frantically crying, sobbing over his wife’s body whose blood ran from the table onto the carpet. Butters would have fun getting those stains out eventually. 

“Stan?” Kenny asked the familiar character. He got no response, but the desolate look in the man’s eyes, one Stan had carried since his tenth birthday, told Kenny the immediate truth. 

“Stan, calm down!”

Calm down may not have been the right thing to say, granted that there was Wendy’s corpse sitting on the table, but it was all that he could think of Stan, quivering and bloodied, slowly tore his eyes away from the sight of his wife’s pale moon face. In his eyes, she was still breathing, her heart beating slowly, but with Hell’s Pass Hospital out of service, there was no way in hell of saving her. It never occurred to him that she was already dead. 

“Stan, how did you get here? I thought you lived in a different state!” Kenny exclaimed. Stan flinched at how loud he was being. 

“I... We moved back to the C-Colorado farm, Kenny.” Stan scrunched his nose, moving his bloody hand up to its bridge. “My dad wanted to go back and since everyone was still living with him, we all went too… Even me and Wendy.” 

Kenny was hurt. Stan had been in the area, only an hour away, and he hadn’t even bothered checking if Kenny’s home phone was still in service? 

“You should’ve called, Stan! We missed you and Wendy back here in South Park..!” 

“I thought that everybody had abandoned this town. I just- Y’know, thought you would finally move somewhere better-”

“Somewhere better? Admit it, you forgot my number, didn’t you?”

Stan was taken aback by Kenny’s rudeness. “No, I just have phone call anxiety! If you had ended up moving on and somebody else lived in your house, then I would look stupid, okay?” 

“Dude, whatever-”

Clyde burst into the room holding handfuls of medical supplies to use on Wendy. He hadn’t realized that she was dead either. He threw them upon the table, right next to the corpse.

“Where was she shot?” Clyde yelled in no certain direction. His full focus was on the dead body in front of him. Nobody had realized that Eric was calmly lounging on the couch as if he didn’t care and that Butters had suddenly gone missing. Well, Timmy did, but he didn’t care enough to tell the others. Him and Jimmy were more interested at blankly staring at the scene in front of them.

“She was- It… in the back and in the back of the neck! We were running away when he fired.” Stan said, forgetting all about his ongoing feud with Kenny. It was odd, Eric thought as he observed, that Stan was so easily pulled away from his dying wife just to get into an argument with Kenny. He was snappy, of course. Anyone would be if their wife was shot, but to be so easily distracted? It was almost if Stan was aware that his lover had turned into nothing but a pile of dead human parts. He knew, deep down at least, that Wendy was no longer Wendy. She was just a dead body now, and Eric didn’t see why people were so attached to those.

Clyde flipped the body over. He felt like he was going to throw up as he stared at the mess of blood and bullets in front of him. His whole life, he had played the part of the class scaredy-cat, always trying to prove he was brave through stupid means, immediately regretting it all afterward. The only good thing he got out of it was his tongue piercing, which hurt like hell but at least it looked cool. 

Touching the bullet wounds made Clyde incredibly nauseous, but he knew he had to remove the bullets. He dug through the medkit to find a pair of tweezers but a piercing screech coming from upstairs stopped his startling train of thought.

Butters, holding an axe over his head, rushed down the stairs, leaping over the couch and slamming the weapon, which was an extreme amount of really fucking sharp, into Wendy’s corpse’s neck. The head was cut clean off, all in one fell swoop. If she hadn’t been dead before, and she definitely was, she was dead now. She’d been fully decapitated. Maybe her body might run around like a headless chicken, but that was the closest to ‘alive’ she was ever going to get again. 

The entire room stared at Butters, who looked extremely proud of what he had just done.

“Man, I’m glad I took her out before she turned! We’d have a runner on our hands if I didn’t-”

Stan lunged at Butters, pinning him onto the ground. A swift punch to the face knocked out one of Butters’s teeth, but Stan was quickly restrained by Kenny and Cartman. Clyde would’ve helped but he had been busy spewing his guts out. His vomit mixed with Wendy’s blood. 

“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO THAT FOR? I’M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU, BUTTERS!” screeched Stan as he tried to pull away from his captors. The two had Stan firmly in their grips but his legs were still swinging, trying to kick Butters, who was hunched over and clutching his mouth. 

“Stan, it’s just a corpse-” Eric tried to say. Stan turned to him, still fighting his grasp. It wasn’t a fucking corpse, it was his wife for fuck’s sake!

“I LOVED HER, CARTMAN!”

“Yeah, LOVED. She’s dead now! Harming her corpse isn’t hurting her-”

“You don’t know ANYTHING!” 

Stan swung his leg back to kick Eric in the knee, but his legs were stopped by Jimmy holding them together. He’d got invested enough in the story to actually help with the situation. Also, as much as he held a small grudge against Eric, he knew that Stan would probably slam Butters’s axe into his forehead. Jimmy needed Eric alive if what he was really in South Park for was going to work, but maybe the plans could be switched. He’d need to consult Nichole if anything were to happen. 

“Cartman, maybe you could not be a douche?” Kenny grunted, holding back Stan’s elbow from swinging into him.

“Fuck, fine. Dude, Butters is fucked up in the head, okay. Remember the zombie-apocalypse prank?” 

Shit, Stan was so worked up about his wife being dead and Kenny being mad that he hadn’t even realized that Butters had woken up from the coma he was in during the end of high school. 

Stan stopped flailing. “Y-Yeah, I remember! Holy fuck, Butters!” 

“Yeah, Butters woke up,” Kenny said, relieved he could loosen his grip on Stan, “He’s delusional though. He sees the world as some weird Walking Dead parody. Seeing blood probably put him in a state of panic and he thought Wendy was going to turn into a zombie. She wasn’t alive, so she didn’t just get murdered, okay?”

“Oh.. O-Okay… Still, he defaced her corpse!” Stan yelled.

“He didn’t know,” defended Kenny.

“What’re y’all saying about me? I ain’t delusional! I could see that she was dead so she was gonna get infected and turn soon!” Butters piped up. His words were slightly slurred as blood poured from his mouth. He held two teeth in his right hand. 

“We- we were just joking…” Kenny muttered. He probably shouldn’t have said all of that right in front of Butters...

“Oh, okay!”

Or maybe he should’ve. It seemed that Butters had already forgotten it happened. Odd.

Stan fell to the ground as he was released by his friends. He blankly stared at the floor, noticing the blood that was soaked into the carpet. Butters’s blood was darker than Wendy’s. 

“Do you have any alcohol, Butters?” Stan asked, his melancholy voice running flat across the ground.

“No, I don’t drink,”

“Okay.”

The room fell into an awkward silence. Of course, like most awkward silences the group had throughout their whole lives, it was broken by the common sound of Clyde throwing up.

“Dude, that’s fucking gross!” Cartman yelled.

“How am I supposed to clean that out of my carpet, Clyde?” Butters asked, not paying attention to the blood around him. He moved over to Clyde, his mouth still gushing, and patted him on the back. “C’mon, buddy, get it all out. I’ll clean it up.” 

“S-Sorry,” Clyde muttered, “I don’t like blood and shit.”

“Remember that time you passed out during a Civil War documentary because there was an amputation on screen?” Eric asked through a chuckle.

“Dude, I fuckin’ lived that shit. I bet if I watched it out I’d get an anxiety attack or something.”

“Wait, why?” Stan asked.

“Clyde got hit by a truck and it turned him into a pussy, unlike Jimmy and Timmy, who are cool,” Kenny said. 

“Shut the fuck up, I got my legs cut off!” Clyde yelled. Stan looked down.

“Huh,” Stan said, “weird.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to-” Uh oh, Clyde felt a second wind of vomit force itself up his throat. He quickly turned back to the ground, once more spewing out an unreasonable amount of liquid. His throat burned from all of the stomach acids corroding it. 

Because he was such a forgettable character, everybody’s focus shifted off of Clyde. It was mostly because he was disgusting, smelled like vomit and sweat and a little bit of blood, and looked as if he hadn’t washed his hair in months, in which he hadn’t. 

Stan had turned to Wendy’s corpse, grief overcoming his body once more. He started to break down, choking out loud sobs once more. He moved to the body, staring at its pale hands. A neat wedding ring sat on the ring finger of her right hand. He slipped it off of her and fitted it to his own pinky. It was the only finger of his that it would fit on. 

“So…” Kenny started, not knowing where to go. “Mind telling us what happened?” 

“I-” Stan choked, “It was Randy.”

Even at the mention of that name, Stan felt himself go back to the moment it all happened. Before Wendy was shot, before Shelly was shot, even before his own mother was shot. He could imagine what Randy was doing before the situation unfolded. Smoking Tegridy crack and Tegridy weed. Abusing the product. He had always been aware that his father was an angry drunk. He never thought anything would ever get that bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stan/Wendy backstory thing next chapter~


	11. Tegridy Farms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i m b a c k
> 
> sorry that ive beeeeeeen uuuh kinda gone for two or so months? ive started a new writing project that i am going to call "the zombie clyde au" for now even though it has nothing to do with zombies but anyway new chapter yes

It was yesterday when it all happened.

Wendy had only been dead a single day, but Stan felt as if it had been years.

Sickening screams still rung through his ears, the immense pain his loving wife was put through as four slick bullets shot through her body. It was horrifying, and he had watched it all happen right in front of his eyes. He could remember it all like the back of his hands, which were taut and leathery from his work on the farm. And to think that he actually began to like his own father, to enjoy being around him for the first time in a decade. 

Randy was as fucked up as ever.

Using cannabis as part of the common dinner table food had never been a problem. Stan always thought it made everything kind of taste like shit, but it was better than when Randy went through his professional chef era. Of course, once Stan had gotten officially ‘high’ for the first time (via eating his father’s shitty Tegridy Burger on accident,)he began to see life on the farm in a new, optimistic light. He finally found out how to love his family, his life, and his friends, ignoring how absolute shit they really were. He was twelve when the accidentally ingested cannabis pulled him out of his depression, and he hadn’t even known he was eating it. 

It was a few hours before Stan had shown up at Butters’s house, maybe around eight in the morning, when Randy had his brilliant idea. He’d been high already, yes, but to line-up all of the Tegridy crack, smoke all of the Tegridy weed, everything that had gone in surplus for the season? Now, that was brilliant to him. Once he had actually done said idea, he sat back to do nothing but relax and think about how much he truly hated his godforsaken family. 

The thinking was where everything had gone wrong. Randy was often known as a ‘Red-Wine Drunk’ to many of those around him. He was the worst type of drunk, angry and reckless, and it was worse when he was entirely fucked up on crack cocaine. When he was drunk on wine, he hated his wife. When he flooded his system with drugs that he had worked so very hard to make legal, he hated his family. 

And with his hatred for his family came another, even more interesting idea. 

A pump-action shotgun. 

“FUCK YOU, SHARON! FUCKIN’ BITCH!” Randy yelled out to his wife as he lumbered up the stairs, his gun slung tightly around his back. Sharon, being used to her idiotic husband constantly screaming hate towards her as she tried to sleep in on the weekends, ignored it, nestling herself into her bed. She’d locked her bedroom door that night. But silly little locks weren’t enough to stop a fucking madman. 

The door burst open, the locks never unclicking as Randy shoved his way into the room. It was as easy as tearing a sheet of paper. Sharon jumped in surprise, but it hadn’t been the first time Randy broke down her door. It’s why she settled for cheap and flimsy replacements. If Randy was going to break down the door, he was going to break it down. It wouldn’t matter how thick, he’d give it all he had until there was nothing in his way. No point in paying big bucks for something her stupid husband would tear down.

“Randy, I told you-” Sharon started. She was quickly followed by slurred and hyperactive yelling coming from the man in her doorway.

“SHUT UP, BITCH!” The shotgun was removed from Randy’s back. This was not the first time Sharon had been threatened with a gun either.

Sharon sighed. She sternly threw a glare at the obviously intoxicated man in front of her, shoving a shotgun into her personal space. “Seriously, Randy? Put the gun down, you’re acting like a child.” She put her hand on the gun, moving it away from between her eyes. Randy shoved it back in place, scratching her forehead with its end. She was getting mad and was ready to tell him off but he kept yelling.

“NO, I’M FUCKIN’ SICK OF YOU!” Randy hadn’t realized the volume of his own voice. It was enough to wake Shelly up, who was sleeping in the next room over. Randy continued his screeching. “YOU’RE JUST A DUMB BITCH WHO DISCOURAGES MY DREAMS! YOU ALWAYS BLAME ME FOR EVERYTHING!” 

“That’s because you act like an idiot, Randy! Now, put the gun down and we can-”

Randy had not shot that specific gun in a long time. He’d forgotten how much recoil it had.

If Shelly had not been already woken by the common sound of her parents fighting, she’d jolted up from the gun’s firing. It wasn’t a rare sound on the farm, her father absolutely loved shooting at random things, but the sound was so loud, almost as if it had come from the room next to hers. 

Shelly hopped out of her bed, dashing out of her door and skidding into her parent’s room. She put her hand on the light switch and flicked it up.

In the middle of the room stood Randy Marsh, blood dappled across his face. His gun had been pressed straight to Sharon’s forehead when he shot. It was covered in blood as well. 

The body of the caring mother of two and loving wife, Sharon Marsh, was lying flat on the bed, bleeding from the forehead. It was an entire waterfall, rushing out of her and soaking into the bed, staining the floral printed bed sheets that she loved so very much. The matching pillows were also ruined. Even if Shelly washed them, she probably would not have been able to get the stain out. Of course, getting the stain out wasn’t her priority. Her mother was dead, killed by her father. Oh, what a sight. 

Shelly wanted to scream, desperately she wanted to scream. But the sound that was lodged in her throat refused to exit her mouth. She swallowed deeply, trying to figure out what to do. Randy turned around to look at her. 

A tirade of insults leaped from Randy’s mouth. He screamed at her, bloody murder at her, and pointed his gun. She was frozen, completely unable to move. Her blood curdled inside of her. She had always been a tough girl, tomboy. However, at the moment when it mattered, she dropped her boyishness behind. Her mother, dear Sharon Marsh, was dead. Splattered against a bed with a bullet wound through her forehead.

Stan’s lips parted from Wendy’s at the sound of the first bullet. Stan, naked and curious, broke from Wendy’s grasp. The couple had been trying to have a child for the past month. Wendy was not sure if she was pregnant yet, but she did not mind trying again every night. The two worked on Randy’s weed farm happily. Sure, they could be considered freeloaders by some, but they did good, honest work.

Stan peeked his forehead out of his good, honest doorway. It wasn’t locked. It was even slightly cracked open. He didn’t think to lock it earlier. It didn’t matter. All he saw was Shelly standing in the hallway.

“Shelly,” Stan called out to his older sister, who he had become friends with as of recent, “go to bed.”

The second gunshot sounded. Shelly went to bed indeed. Stan quickly slammed his door shut, locking it. If tears were welling up in his eyes, he didn’t care. He turned to Wendy, who was sitting on the bed and holding a blanket to her chest. She was in a flowing nightgown, frilly undergarments visible underneath. Her eyes were wide, concerned. “What was it?”

Stan grabbed Wendy’s hand. A knock on the door followed by loud yelling sounded. It screamed about how Stan was a bad son, a worthless boy, and how his wife was ugly. Stan knew that was not true. Wendy was beautiful, having really grown into her face from when she was a child. Her looks had started to show in high school, and although Stan had to admit that girls like Bebe and Nichole were prettier, Wendy was still the apple of his eye. 

The butt of the gun smashed into the door, tearing through it. Stan’s doors had been the same type as Sharon’s. It broke quite easily, Randy running inside after it smashed open. He looked around, but his useless son was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he saw the top of a head disappear from the outside of the window. He growled, then quickly turned around. His new plan was to head out the front door and chase them through the weed fields.

Randy left the house, then ran to its back. He could see Stan (who was now wearing nothing but a Tegridy Farms t-shirt that he had pulled on last minute) and Wendy running, hand in hand. God, he hated it. He was going to blow their brains out, both of them! He aimed the gun, then shot his first shot. The couple was lucky that they had suddenly tripped, or the bullet would've rammed through Stan’s head, killing him. 

Unwisely, Stan and Wendy got back up and continued running. It would’ve been better if they had stayed on the ground, silently cowering. Randy aimed at Wendy that time. He was so lucky to have such a lovely pump-action shotgun. It was accurate, even from a distance, and had a small scope for accurate aiming. 

Four gunshots rang through the air, followed by a shrill scream. The first bullet hit Wendy in the shoulder. The second pierced into her left lung. The third and fourth hit roughly the same spot in her back, nearly exactly in the middle of the spine. She fell to the ground, pulling Stan down with her.

In the moonlight, Randy could not see that he had only killed Wendy. It appeared to him that he had shot down his son too. Satisfied with his work, he turned around, walking through the dead fields of out of season marijuana. All of the crops had died for the winter and would be dead for a while. Luckily, the coca plant was doing fine inside of the greenhouse. Business would still be up for a while, and now with four fewer mouths to feed and no Stan to pay, the money would surely stack up with minimal effort. He had done a good deed, mostly for himself. For the past ten or so years, he’d slowly eliminated threats around the area. He’d taken out the insects that destroyed his plants nine years ago, removed Eric Cartman from South Park for stealing his weed back before Stan started junior year, and now he successfully murdered his entire family in cold blood. He was doing pretty nicely. 

Meanwhile, on the ground, Stan laid in pain. His wife was not dead but was panting like a dog in the summertime. Her whole body stung with a fire unlike anything she’d ever felt. It was intense, coursing through her and striking every nerve in her body. Her eyes were flooded as a river of blood spilled onto the dead hemp below her. She was going to die, and Stan knew this. However, his body froze in place. Wendy’s lips were ghostly white, all of the color quickly draining from her entire being. It leaked out of her and stained Stan’s shirt. ‘Tegridy Weed,’ the shirt read. It turned from a light tan to the dark color of red wine. 

It took a few seconds for Stan to regain himself, but he had become good at keeping himself composed. If he wasn’t, his friends and family would have to deal with his outbursts nearly every second of the day. He picked Wendy up from there ground where she laid and started to make his way back to the farmhouse. His shirt became a deeper shade. He did not care. There was a new priority in his mind, taking a right turn from the back of the house to the barn, where Randy kept several types of firearms. By the time he entered, he knew what he wanted. Two canisters of gas and a handgun. It was easy enough to find a lighter on a weed farm, so he had grabbed one of those too. He put Wendy in the passenger seat of his car. Once he had finished doing what he needed to do, he’d drive her to the nearest hospital. It had been the one on Hell’s Pass, and he hadn’t been there in ages. 

Randy was graced with a bullet in the gut the moment Stan had entered. He fell over onto the couch, groaning in pain. Any move of retaliation planned by him was foiled by the pungent scent of gas flooding the building. Anything left in the house, Stan’s shitty father, his rude sister, his overbearing mother, would all be burnt to a crisp in a matter of minutes. Luckily, Shelly and Sharon were already dead and wouldn’t be forced to feel the excruciating flames that Randy would.

“I fucking hate you, Dad,” Stan said. He hovered above Randy from where he stood, tempted to kill him with the gun he was holding. Instead, he restrained himself and simply shot Randy in both knees. It would stop Randy from moving as Stan went upstairs and put on a pair of underwear and jeans, which he hadn’t been wearing previously due to the activities he planned to perform on Wendy before she had died. He’d forgotten to change his shirt, which still screamed out its bold red. The blood had already started drying as Stan returned. He stood in the doorway, watching Randy pathetically groan. Randy had fallen off of the couch and was trying to crawl his way to Stan using his arms. Stan had looked at him with dead eyes and threw the lighter into the house.

Stan walked back to his car, getting inside and silently starting to drive. His emotions were too demolished for him to cry. He focused on the fact that Tegridy Farms was no more. The fire was wildly spreading across the fields. Nothing would be left when it finally ceased. 

“Stan,” Wendy muttered. 

Stan’s eyes opened wide. He was sure Wendy was dead. 

“I’ll miss you.” 

The next thing he knew, Stan had parked his car in front of Butters’s house. He could see the silhouettes of people through the opened windows. That was when the tears started to flow. He grabbed Wendy and dragged her inside on his back.

**Author's Note:**

> The first chapter is, yeah, pretty short. I'm working on the next one already though, so hopefully, it'll be out soon


End file.
